A love letter to the human brain mapping community.
Dear OHBM Community,
As I begin my term as Chair of the OHBM Council for the next 12 months, I am grateful for the opportunity to serve our Organization, which to me has been more than just a professional community; it has been a place of learning, growth, and connection. In particular, our annual meetings have provided many of us with countless opportunities to share, learn, and forge life-changing friendships. Your elected Council is committed to ensuring that these opportunities continue to be available to current and future generations of all neuroimagers, as we navigate an era still marked by economic disparities and now faced with urgent environmental challenges.
Over the past three decades, our organization has grown significantly in both size and diversity—a testament to the strength and continued relevance of our scientific community. However, with expansion comes increased complexity and challenges in sustainability. Our meetings now require large convention centers, attracting thousands of attendees from across the globe. At the same time, the scope of brain mapping has expanded far beyond its original focus in the 1990s. The wide array of techniques, methods, and applications in our field presents a growing challenge for our Program Committee, which sometimes must make tough editorial decisions to ensure that our limited annual meeting time best reflects the full breadth of our current science.
These developments are positive, but they also compel us to consider how OHBM can best fulfill the sometimes conflicting aspirations of its members. The Council has a crucial role in guiding the organization, with your input, to remain responsive to and supportive of these diverse needs. To address these challenges, we are strengthening our connections with regional Chapters and Special Interest Groups and aiming to expand our meetings to new locations around the world in a meaningful manner. By doing so, we hope to foster a stronger sense of belonging among our members, bringing a broader set of perspectives to the table, and making it easier and more affordable for diverse communities to engage in the global exchange of ideas.
In parallel, we are enhancing our digital presence with a refreshed website, increased activity on social media (new! Follow OHBM on Instagram @ohbm.ig), and by making audiovisual content from our meetings freely available on the OHBM YouTube channel. This ensures that the material is accessible to everyone, including those who are only able to attend the meeting when it is closer to home because of budget constraints or wish to minimize their environmental impact. While we explored hybrid meeting formats during the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges such as low online attendance and high audiovisual capturing costs have led us to reconsider this approach. Nonetheless, as technology continues to advance, I am confident that more affordable and engaging solutions will emerge and be adopted eventually.
With Archimedes, Syracuse, summer 2024.
Brain mapping has always been driven by technological and methodological innovations. As new tools and instruments become available, novel scientific questions arise, fueling translational applications. However, as we continue to push the boundaries of our field, we must also critically examine how this may shift the nature of our research aims and the scientific questions that need to be addressed. We also need to carefully evaluate whether increasingly sophisticated instruments, analytical methods, and large, but not necessarily diversified, datasets are enabling us to address the most meaningful scientific questions. Additionally, many of us looked forward to artificial intelligence (AI) learning from brain sciences, particularly from insights gained through functional neuroimaging data. While this might still hold true, the technology driving the current revolution of AI applications in everyday life has largely advanced with minimal contributions from brain mapping and the most current neuroscience. For now, it is actually quite the opposite—neuroimaging analytics leverage machine-learning tools for “decoding the brain.” How will this approach impact our ability to discover new neuro-mechanistic phenomena? Will the next generation of AI technology leverage current neuroscience knowledge to push beyond its current limits while addressing its staggering energy demands?
In medicine, we must ask why our functional mapping tools have not made a more significant impact in radiology departments to assist in the diagnosis of brain dysfunctions. Are we delivering actionable insights that can truly inform personalized neurology and the understanding of complex behavioral traits in neuropsychiatry? If not, what are the barriers? As molecular biology continues to advance, with diagnostic blood tests for neurological disorders on the horizon, brain mapping must rise to meet these challenges on its own terrain or, better yet, in synergy with other fields of biomedical and health sciences.
I am confident that our field will continue to be relevant if we persist in asking the hard scientific questions, pushing the frontiers of knowledge across disciplines, and embracing the complexity of brain-body interactions and the influence of physical and social environments. Our community is ideally positioned to make this happen. And it will happen if our field integrates a greater diversity of biological data, nuanced personality and behavioral traits, and environmental factors more systematically into multimodal brain mapping approaches. It’s an ambitious and complex endeavor, but one that holds incredible promise for the future of our field.
Above all, the true strength of a scholarly organization like OHBM lies in its people and their engagement. I encourage everyone, at every stage of their career and from all corners of the world, to get involved in the wide range of activities of the OHBM community—from Special Interest Groups to regional Chapters, and to contribute to our online presence. It is through such active engagement that we will continue to thrive as a forward-looking community, pushing the boundaries of brain mapping and making a transformative impact on science, medicine, and society.
Sylvain.
Council Chair of OHBM.
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~ If you wish to learn more about how to engage with OHBM Chapters, Special Interest Groups and other opportunities to make a difference, please reach out to OHBM Secretary Dr. Hiromasa Takemura (htakemur@nips.ac.jp, info@humanbrainmapping.org ). ~