Marcin Szwed (Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland)
A neuroscientists’ journey into environmental neuroscience. What large-scale scale
human neuroimaging can tell us about the impact of environment and society on brain
and behavior
The last decade has seen an expansion of large-scale MRI neuroimaging, with study populations reaching thousands of subjects. This expansion has made it possible, for example, to investigate the brain basis of individual psychological differences in personality and cognition. It has also enabled the growth of environmental neuroscience, which studies how environmental exposures such as air pollution influence brain function. Here I will discuss the results of the NeuroSmog study, which assesses how exposure to air pollution affects the developing brains of 741 schoolchildren in Southern Poland, a region characterized by very high levels of particulate air pollution. I will present diffusion, resting-state, and task fMRI results showing that both early-life and recent air pollution exposure significantly affect the brain, in particular neural circuits for attention and cognition. These results are in line with a large body of evidence showing associations between air pollution and increased ADHD incidence.