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For decades, neuroscientists have studied the human brain by asking people to lie very still inside a brain scanner and perform carefully controlled tasks. Those experiments have revealed a remarkable amount about how the brain works. But they also leave out something fundamental.

Real life is not a series of isolated tasks. We are constantly perceiving the world, making predictions, deciding what to do, acting on our surroundings and adjusting our behavior when those actions produce unexpected results.

Now, Western University neuroscientists Jörn Diedrichsen and Jody Culham are helping lead an international effort to study the brain in a way that more closely mimics this complexity—by putting people inside an fMRI scanner and having them play video games.

The work is part of the Digital Brain Project, a large international research initiative supported by social media giant Meta that aims to create a massive, openly shared data set of human brain activity. The project brings together researchers from institutions around the world, including Western, to explore how the brain behaves across a much broader range of cognitive states than conventional brain imaging typically captures.

Diedrichsen has spent years developing ways to map brain activity across many different tasks, including the Raynor Cerebellum Project , rather than relying primarily on resting-state scans or one carefully isolated experiment at a time. His lab has developed a battery of more than 60 tasks that can be performed during an fMRI scan, allowing researchers to push one participant's brain into many different states.

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