CNS 2025: Q&A with Marie Banich
Marie Banich’s journey in cognitive neuroscience began with very private motivations: first from a curiosity about what her household’s propensity for left handedness meant after which to a drive to assist individuals who undergo from undesirable ideas, after witnessing the devastating results that had on a beloved one. However like many scientists, her path has been something however linear.
In her upcoming discuss to simply accept the 2025 Distinguished Profession Contributions Award on the annual CNS in assembly in Boston, Banich will take the viewers on a tour of the development of her work, together with the sudden turns it took. The discuss, titled “Cognitive Management: From Interacting Hemispheres to Purging Ideas,” will arrange how her dissertation work to know variations between mind hemispheres was a quest to uncover the ability of mind connectivity and how one can ultimately leverage it in medical settings.
“How do I marshal the sources of the mind to get a process performed?” says Banich of the College of Colorado Boulder. “That’s what I consider as cognitive management. And what got here out of my early work was that it’s interactions between mind areas which have implications for management.”
That work laid the muse for groundbreaking work on how the mind can purge undesirable ideas, one thing I spoke with Banich about in 2023. Prematurely of CNS 2024, I spoke along with her once more to study extra about her early curiosity and work in cognitive neuroscience, how the work would possibly translate to people affected by psychological misery, and what she is trying ahead to on the Boston assembly.
CNS: What acquired you curious about cognitive neuroscience within the first place?
Banich: In some ways, I acquired into the sector as a result of my mom was left handed. One in all her sisters was left handed, and plenty of of my cousins are left handed. So I grew up, listening to that left handed folks have been extra artistic and attention-grabbing, like Leonardo DaVinci, than right-handers like myself. I went to varsity planning on being a doctor. Nonetheless, in my first psychology class, I discovered that the brains of left handers and proper handers are completely different, and that’s after I realized that the mind may affect behavioral traits, and I discovered that fascinating.
I used to be a double main in biology and psychology. As my time in school drew to a detailed, I nonetheless deliberate to go to medical college. However then I spotted that I didn’t care in regards to the gastrointestinal system or the pulmonary system, and even throughout the nervous system, I actually didn’t care in regards to the spinal wire, however simply the mind. In order that’s how I ended up right here.
CNS: The primary a part of your physique of labor was actually about laying the muse for understanding cognitive management. How did you finally shift into extra clinically oriented analysis?
Banich: To make that transition, I knew I wanted to discover a paradigm that’s actually versatile and would work with completely different populations. In my very unimaginative method, I picked the Stroop Activity as a result of it’s a strong behavioral phenomena, and most all people can acknowledge colours – little children, older folks, folks with mind injury.
The Stroop take a look at is an efficient measure of cognitive management as a result of it requires management at many various ranges. At a fundamental degree, to exert management it’s important to overcome the prepotent bias to learn the phrase as a way to determine the ink colour. Then it’s important to exert management with regard to semantic info. For instance, if I present you the phrase “purple” in blue ink, purple and blue battle, proper? So that you’ve acquired to basically exert management to select the particular colour related to the ink, not the colour related to the phrase. After which lastly, it’s important to exert management on the response degree, selecting the response related to the ink colour, like saying “blue” relatively than saying “purple”.
In one among our first MRI research, we confirmed that when management was tough, reminiscent of whenever you attended to the ink colour as an alternative of the phrase, exercise in lateral prefrontal cortex elevated in comparison with attending to the phrase. Nonetheless, in later research we discovered that the anterior cingulate cortex helps with management when choosing a response is difficult, and that whether or not you want management on the degree of the cingulate relies upon partially on how good a job your lateral prefrontal cortex has performed in exerting management at different ranges.
CNS: And so how did you are taking this mannequin and apply it to the work on intentional forgetting?
Banich: Once we consider exerting management, it usually includes choosing one facet of data and inhibiting or down-weighting different info. So one of many questions we turned fascinated with was “How will we cease info from being retrieved from long run reminiscence? This was a 2007 paper that we have been tremendous lucky to get revealed in Science.
Principally we confirmed that there seems to be a generalized mechanism in prefrontal cortex that works to focus on mind areas to inhibit them. And we confirmed that connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus is vital for inhibiting retrieval of data from long run reminiscence.
Now this work was all about suppressing the retrieval of data from long run reminiscence, which, by way of psychiatric problems, is most related for PTSD. However I actually wished to have a look at how one can inhibit repetitive ideas that aren’t essentially associated to long-term reminiscence.
So, possibly three or 4 years after that preliminary paper was revealed, I awakened in the midst of the evening and thought ‘I can do the identical factor, however have a look at working reminiscence.’ In that prior research we had used our data of mind group and the truth that the hippocampus is crucial for long-term reminiscence. However since working reminiscence includes the reactivation of data shops in particular areas of the cortex, just like the visible cortex if you end up preserving a picture in thoughts, I figured we may look at exercise in that particular area of the mind. As soon as I had that perception, I sort of hit myself. Like, why did it take me half a decade to determine this out?
CNS: Your work has recognized 4 distinct operations folks can use to manage undesirable ideas: sustaining a thought, changing a thought, clearing all ideas, or suppressing a selected thought, and you’ve got used that info to map the distinct neural patterns within the mind and determine extra particulars about how that happens for every. What’s your imaginative and prescient for utilizing this info to assist folks within the clinic?
Banich: We’ve discovered that the mind patterns related to every of those operations is fairly constant throughout folks, offering a mind signature for every operation, which allows medical translation. As a part of our joint work, Jarrod Lewis-Peacock is beginning a biofeedback experiment within the MRI, by which we are going to ask somebody to take away an merchandise of their thoughts by way of one among these operations and make a circle on the display screen as giant as potential; the higher their mind sample matches the prototypical sample for that operation, the bigger the circle shall be.
One other avenue for potential medical translation is that we’re testing the speculation that the mind signatures for these operations is perhaps muddled or much less differentiated in individuals who self-report having hassle controlling their ideas. If there aren’t clear strains between these management mechanisms, then we hope that biofeedback would possibly make it potential to coach people to have crisper representations of every operation.
As well as, one among my grad college students is analyzing whether or not there are different operations which may assist to take away info from the main focus of your ideas. One manipulation she is exploring is to focus your consideration inward, in your respiration. The opposite manipulation is one by which you flip your focus outward to trace a sinusoidal line that oscillates on the similar periodicity as respiration. Our hope is that we will then determine which removing operation work greatest for which forms of folks. For instance, maybe changing a thought works greatest for somebody with nervousness however following the sinusoid works greatest for somebody with despair. So, we will begin to actually take into consideration customizing the type of interventions you resolve to make use of in a medical setting.
CNS: What are you enthusiastic about for the assembly in Boston?
Banich: It’s actually particular for me to be acknowledged by my friends. CNS is the place I see my mental house. What I actually love about this assembly is the best way that the work introduced right here threads collectively cognitive science and neuroscience.
CNS: Is there the rest you wish to add?
Banich: It’s a humorous coincidence however I’m actually happy that Ken Paller will even be honored on the assembly this 12 months. Ken and I first met a few years in the past, after we each have been invited to attend a gathering in Italy for junior students underneath 40. The assembly was held at a monastery within the Italian countryside, with lengthy lunch breaks full with wine. I neglect precisely who found it, but it surely turned out that the monastery had tennis courts, and we requested to make use of them throughout lunch. So I first actually acquired to know Ken on the tennis court docket. It feels somewhat full circle to have somebody who’s a pal additionally being acknowledged at this 12 months’s assembly.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
