Heritability of movie-evoked brain activity and connectivity
The neural bases of sensory processing are conserved across people but no two individuals experience the same stimulus in exactly the same way. Recent work has established that the idiosyncratic nature of subjective experience is underpinned by individual variability in brain responses to sensory information. However, the fundamental origins of this individual variability have yet to be…
A recent study has uncovered a genetic basis for individual differences in brain responses to movies. Using 7T fMRI data from a twin sample, researchers have quantified the heritability of high-dimensional brain activity and connectivity. They found that movie-evoked brain activity is heritable across the cortex, with greater heritability for lower temporal frequency information, particularly in associative cortical areas.
By employing hyperalignment, the study decomposed this heritability into genetic similarity in where and how sensory information is processed. Moreover, the heritability of brain activity patterns can be partially attributed to the heritability of the neural timescale, a measure of local circuit functioning. The findings extend to the heritability of movie-evoked functional connectivity, revealing that brain responses to complex stimuli are indeed heritable and that this heritability is partially due to genetic control over stable aspects of brain function.
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