Christopher deCharms is a serial entrepreneur, neuroscientist

Neuroscientist

A neuroscientist is an individual who studies the scientific field of neuroscience or any of its related sub-fields...

, social entrepreneur, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, inventor, and currently founder and CEO of Omneuron, a life sciences company focusing on novel magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging , nuclear magnetic resonance imaging , or magnetic resonance tomography is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures...

 (MRI) technologies, and founding executive director of NPO, the Non-Profit President's Organization, and the Lineage Fund.

Neuroscience

DeCharms has developed a set of technologies allowing patients, physicians, researchers, and subjects to visualize and control the functioning of the brain using non-invasive methods based on real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI), and is exploring applications of functional brain imaging. DeCharms started his research career in neurophysiology

Neurophysiology

Neurophysiology is a part of physiology. Neurophysiology is the study of nervous system function...

 as a graduate student and later postdoctoral researcher

Postdoctoral researcher

Postdoctoral research is scholarly research conducted by a person who has recently completed doctoral studies, normally within the previous five years. It is intended to further deepen expertise in a specialist subject, including acquiring novel skills and methods...

 in the laboratory of Professor Michael Merzenich

Michael Merzenich

Michael M. Merzenich is a professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. His contributions to the field are numerous. He took the sensory cortex maps developed by his predecessors like Archie Tunturi, Clinton Woolsey, Vernon Mountcastle, Wade Marshall, and Philip...

 at the UCSF Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience. This work included recording patterns of brain activation from multiple locations in the brain, and how these patterns of activation underlie perception, experience and learning.

rtfMRI training

DeCharms and a team of collaborative researchers have explored whether people can learn to control patterns of activation taking place inside their own brains. It had not previously been possible to non-invasively measure brain activation in real time using neuroimaging, but recent advances in computation and neuroimaging have made this a reality using rtfMRI. Subjects' brain activation patterns are measured using real time fMRI as the subjects watch from inside the scanner using virtual reality goggles, and subjects are trained to control the patterns of activation inside their own brain. This in turn leads to changes in the subjects' mental experiences. For example, subjects have learned to control activation in brain regions associated with pain, and they report a corresponding decrease in their levels of pain. DeCharms' team coined the term Neuroimaging Therapy, currently in use to describe this approach. Research on rtfMRI-based training has been published in the scientific literature and has also been broadly covered in the popular press including The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

,
BBC, NPR, Wired, Technology Review.
This research has been conducted at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 and more recently at Omneuron's 3T MRI Research Center in Menlo Park

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

, California through funding from the National Institutes of Health

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

.

Selected research papers

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 
                     

                     External links

                     1. Omneuron's website
                     2. TED Talks: Christopher deCharms scans the brain in real time at TED
                        TED (conference)
                        TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"....
                        
                        in 2008
                     3. TWO VIEWS OF MIND: Abhidharma and Brain Science by Christopher deCharms
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