# Emery N. Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Your Brainstem's Bundles

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-academic-minute-1102038/emery-n-brown-massachusetts-institute-of-technology-your-brainstem-s-bundles
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-academic-minute-1102038/emery-n-brown-massachusetts-institute-of-technology-your-brainstem-s-bundles.md
Podcast: [The Academic Minute](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-academic-minute-1102038)
Published: 2026-07-08T04:01:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.academicminute.org/p/emery-n-brown-massachusetts-institute
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/204717915/8d96d267a29f1b83cd121aef1a0a1d40.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-academic-minute-1102038/episodes/emery-n-brown-massachusetts-institute-of-technology-your-brainstem-s-bundles
Duration seconds: 150

## Resource

Brainstems are hard to image because of their size and density, but is that about to change? Emery N. Brown , professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , says yes. Faculty Bio: Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Brown is a neuroscientist-anesthesiologist-statistician whose research has contributed toward understanding how anesthetics act in the brain. In his statistics research he has developed signal processing algorithms to solve important data analysis challenges in neuroscience. For his work he received the National Medal of Science in January 2025. Transcript: Don’t sleep on the importance of your brainstem. This part of your brain is a vital conduit between your body and the rest of the brain. The signals that flow through bundles of nerve fibers there govern essential functions such as consciousness, sleep, breathing, heart rate and motion. While we know that the brainstem is absolutely crucial and that damage there can present patients with major problems, we haven’t had good ways to image and keep track of the health of its fiber bundles for reasons including how small and densely packed they are. But earlier this year, my colleagues and I, led by my graduate student Mark Olchanyi, developed a new way to clearly see brainstem fiber bundles in diffusion MRI imaging. The Brainstem Bundle Tool uses AI to analyze MRI images from patients, enabling us to track the size and structural integrity of eight distinct nerve fiber bundles. In the study we showed that the too…

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