Rex Eugene Jung

• Ph.D., Clinical Neuropsychology
• Professor (Assistant) at University of New Mexico

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with higher intelligence are more likely to have larger gray matter volume in brain areas predominantly located in parieto-frontal regions. These findings were usually interpreted to mean that individuals with more cortical brain volume possess more neurons and thus exhibit more computational capa...

Openness/Intellect (i.e., openness to experience) is the Big Five personality factor most consistently associated with individual differences in creativity. Recent psychometric evidence has demonstrated that this factor consists of two distinct aspects—Intellect and Openness. Whereas Intellect reflects perceived intelligence and intellectual engage...

Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly intricate, domain-specific knowledge and skill, but also domain-general processing styles and the affective drive to create. This study presents structural imaging data indicating that musically creative people (as indicated by self-report) have greater c...

Creativity is a vast construct, seemingly intractable to scientific inquiry—perhaps due to the vague concepts applied to the field of research. One attempt to limit the purview of creative cognition formulates the construct in terms of evolutionary constraints, namely that of blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). Behaviorally, one can lim...

"Is there a biology of intelligence which is characteristic of the normal human nervous system?" Here we review 37 modern neuroimaging studies in an attempt to address this question posed by Halstead (1947) as he and other icons of the last century endeavored to understand how brain and behavior are linked through the expression of intelligence and...

Depression and PTSD are prevalent psychiatric conditions that often co-occur and significantly impact quality of life. Ketamine has emerged as a promising rapid-acting treatment for both conditions, while traditional treatments like psychotherapy typically require weeks to show effects. This study investigated whether combining ketamine with psycho...

Much of the research on the neural correlates of creativity has emphasized creative cognition, and growing evidence suggests that creativity is related to functional properties of the default and frontoparietal control networks. The present work expands on this body of evidence by testing associations of creative achievement with connectivity profi...

Supratotal resection of primary brain tumors is being advocated especially when involving “non-eloquent” tissue. However, there is extensive neuropsychological data implicating functions critical to higher cognition in areas considered “non-eloquent” by most surgeons. The goal of the study was to determine pre-surgical brain regions that would be p...

Conscientiousness, and related constructs impulsivity and self-control, have been related to structural and functional properties of regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions belong to a single large-scale network, labeled the salience/ventral attention network...

Psychologist J. P. Guildford issued a challenge to study creativity nearly 70 years ago. How well have we done and what might the next steps be in our endeavors to understand creativity? The field of creativity research has examined the internal thinking process of creativity, largely through measures of divergent thinking and remote associates. We...

Background and Hypothesis Schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) share genetic risk factors, yet patients display differential levels of cognitive impairment. We hypothesized a genome-transcriptome-functional connectivity (frontoparietal)-cognition pathway linked to SZ-versus-BD differences, and conducted a multiscale study to delineate this...

Previous research in the field of personality neuroscience has identified associations of conscientiousness and related constructs like impulsivity and self-control with structural and functional properties of particular regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions probabl...

Previous research in the field of personality neuroscience has identified associations of conscientiousness and related constructs like impulsivity and self-control with structural and functional properties of particular regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions probabl...

Intelligence and intellectual disability (ID) or intellectual developmental disorder (IDD), according to the most recent terminology, might not be natural kinds but the result of a historically contingent human attempt of self-definition and self-characterization. The seeds of intelligence as a measure for classifying humans were sown at the end of...

The Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) predicts that human intelligence is closely linked to structural and functional properties of several brain regions mainly located in the parietal and frontal cortices. It also proposes that solving abstract reasoning tasks involves multiple processing stages and thus requires the harmonic interplay of...

Background Libman-Sacks endocarditis in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is commonly complicated with embolic cerebrovascular disease (CVD) or valve dysfunction for which high-risk valve surgery is frequently performed. However, the role of medical therapy alone for Libman-Sacks endocarditis and associated acute CVD remains undefine...

Primary brain tumors often occur near eloquent regions, affecting language, motor, and memory capacity, with awake mapping and tailored resection designed to preserve higher cognitive functioning. The effects of such tumors on subcortical structures, including the thalamus and basal ganglia, have been largely unexplored, in spite of the known impor...

An influential model of the neural mechanisms of creative thought suggests that creativity is manifested in the joint contributions of the Default Mode Network (DMN; a set of regions in the medial PFC, lateral and medial parietal cortex, and the medial temporal lobes) and the executive networks within the dorsolateral PFC. Several empirical reports...

Reorganization of eloquent cortex due to neighboring stressors, like tumors and epilepsy, has been previously documented. Here we report reorganization of a subregion of the primary motor cortex due to a slow-growing primary brain tumor. We report the case of a 22-year-old, right-handed male with long-standing focal partial epilepsy involving the r...

Nearly everyone has the ability for creative thought. Yet, certain individuals create works that propel their fields, challenge paradigms, and advance the world. What are the neurobiological factors that might underlie such prominent creative achievement? In this study, we focus on morphometric differences in brain structure between high creative a...

While the behavior of “being musically creative”— improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.—is undoubtedly a complex and highly variable one, recent neuroscientific investigation has offered significant insight into the neural underpinnings of many of the creative processes contributing to such behavior. A previous study from our research group (Ba...

Resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) is a promising task‐free functional imaging approach, which may complement or replace task‐based fMRI (tfMRI) in patients who have difficulties performing required tasks. However, rsfMRI is highly sensitive to head movement and physiological noise, and validation relative to tfMRI and int...

Creative cognition, as measured through divergent thinking (DT), offers insight into one's ability to generate novel ideas. Relatively little work has been done exploring the relationship between creative idea generation tasks and white matter integrity via fractional anisotropy (FA). Our previous work has shown that higher scores on DT tasks were...

The study of human individual differences has matured significantly, in the last decade or so owing, in part, to the notable advances in neuroimaging techniques. There are three major domains of inquiry within individual differences research: personality, creativity, and intelligence. Each has a discrete, testable definition (a new definition for i...

Histological studies have reported microstructural hemispheric asymmetries in several cortical areas of the human brain, but reliable in vivo assessment methods have been lacking so far. Here, we used neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) to examine microstructural asymmetries in in vivo and determine if findings are in accorda...

Neurocognitive dysfunction and brain injury on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are common in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. However, brain MRI is expensive, is restricted by payers, and requires high expertise. Neurocognitive assessment is an easily available, safe, and i...

The connectivity of the human brain is fundamental to understanding the principles of cognitive function, and the mechanisms by which it can go awry. To that extent, tools for estimating human brain networks are required for single participant, group level, and cross-study analyses. We have developed an open-source, cloud-enabled, turn-key pipeline...

Genetic factors are known to influence both risk for schizophrenia (SZ) and variation in brain structure. A pressing question is whether the genetic underpinnings of brain phenotype and the disorder overlap. Using multivariate analytic methods and focusing on 1,402 common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) mapped from the Psychiatric Genomics C...

Historically, the brain bases of creativity have been of great interest to scholars and the public alike. However, recent technological innovations in the neurosciences, coupled with theoretical and methodological advances in creativity assessment, have enabled humans to gain unprecedented insights into the contributions of the brain to creative th...

In this paper we describe an open-access collection of multimodal neuroimaging data in schizophrenia for release to the community. Data were acquired from approximately 100 patients with schizophrenia and 100 age-matched controls during rest as well as several task activation paradigms targeting a hierarchy of cognitive constructs. Neuroimaging dat...

Clinical and cognitive symptoms domain-based subtyping in schizophrenia (Sz) has been critiqued due to the lack of neurobiological correlates and heterogeneity in symptom scores. We, therefore, present a novel data-driven framework using biclustered independent component analysis to detect subtypes from the reliable and stable gray matter concentra...

Background The proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (¹H-MRS) signals from glutamate (or the combined glutamate and glutamine signal—Glx) have been found to be greater in various brain regions in people with schizophrenia. Recently, the Psychiatric Genetics Consortium reported that several common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in glutamate...

As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives...

An important dimension of individual differences, independent of general cognitive ability (GCA), is specialization for verbal or spatial ability. In this study we investigated neuroanatomic, network, and personality features associated with verbal vs. spatial ability. Healthy young adults (N = 244) were evaluated with (1) a cognitive battery yield...

Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to address the potential interaction of brain networks supporting creativity by employing new methods in brain network science. Network methods offer a significant advance compared to individual region of interest studies due to their ability to account for the complex and dynamic interactions among discret...

While there are minimal sex differences in overall intelligence, males, on average, have larger total brain volume and corresponding regional brain volumes compared to females, measures that are consistently related to intelligence. Limited research has examined which other brain characteristics may differentially contribute to intelligence in fema...

There is increasing interest in learning how human brain networks vary as a function of a continuous trait, but flexible and efficient procedures to accomplish this goal are limited. We develop a Bayesian semiparametric model, which combines low-rank factorizations and flexible Gaussian process priors to learn changes in the conditional expectation...

The developmental roots of individual variation in general cognitive ability (GCA) are the subject of intense scientific interest. One unique perspective is offered by developmental instability theory, which suggests that variation in GCA in part reflects the ability to buffer brain development from key environmental and genetic perturbations. Supp...

Imagination involves episodic memory retrieval, visualization, mental simulation, spatial navigation, and future thinking, making it a complex cognitive construct. Prior studies of imagination have attempted to study various elements of imagination (e.g., visualization), but none have attempted to capture the entirety of imagination ability in a si...

The brain’s default network (DN) has been a topic of considerable empirical interest. In fMRI research, DN activity is associated with spontaneous and self-generated cognition, such as mind-wandering, episodic memory retrieval, future thinking, mental simulation, theory of mind reasoning, and creative cognition. Despite large literatures on develop...

Objectives: One of the most prominent features of schizophrenia is relatively lower general cognitive ability (GCA). An emerging approach to understanding the roots of variation in GCA relies on network properties of the brain. In this multi-center study, we determined global characteristics of brain networks using graph theory and related these to...

Mapping brain connectivity based on neuroimaging data is a promising new tool for understanding brain structure and function. In this methods paper, we demonstrate that group independent component analysis (GICA) can be used to perform a dual parcellation of the brain based on its connectivity matrix (cmICA). This dual parcellation consists of a se...

The creativity research community is in search of a viable cognitive measure providing support for behavioral observations that higher ideational output is often associated with higher creativity (known as the equal-odds rule). One such measure has included divergent thinking: the production of many examples or uses for a common or single object or...

This study examined the association between size of the caudate nuclei and intelligence. Based on the central role of the caudate in learning, as well as neuroimaging studies linking greater caudate volume to better attentional function, verbal ability, and dopamine receptor availability, we hypothesized the existence of a positive association betw...

Analyses of gray matter concentration (GMC) deficits in patients with schizophrenia (Sz) have identified robust changes throughout the cortex. We assessed the relationships between diagnosis, overall symptom severity, and patterns of gray matter in the largest aggregated structural imaging dataset to date. We performed both source-based morphometry...

Creative cognition emerges from a complex network of interacting brain regions. This study investigated the relationship between the structural organization of the human brain and aspects of creative cognition tapped by divergent thinking tasks. Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) was used to obtain fiber tracts from 83 segmented cortical regions. Thi...

Hampshire and colleagues used factor analyses and simulations to conclude that the g-factor is not a valid construct for general intelligence because it could be accounted for by at least two independent components defined by distinct brain networks. In our view, their results depend on a number of assumptions and subjective decisions that, at best...

Background: Altered functional connectivity in critical networks has been associated with chronic alcohol abuse. In turn, changes in connectivity in executive control networks (ECNs) may undermine the ability to control alcohol consumption. It was hypothesized that network connectivity would be reduced in individuals with problematic alcohol use (...

The study of individual differences encompasses broad constructs including intelligence, creativity, and personality. However, substantially less research is devoted to the study of specific aptitudes in spite of their importance to educational, occupational, and avocational success. We sought to determine subcortical brain structural correlates of...

World Psychiatry. February, 2014. LETTER TO THE EDITOR Moving beyond intelligence in the revision of ICD-10: specific cognitive functions in intellectual developmental disorders. A lower level of intelligence, as measured by IQ, has historically been the central defining criterion of mental retardation (MR). The use of IQ scores in terms of stan...

Currently, connectomes (e.g., functional or structural brain graphs) can be estimated in humans at $\approx 1~mm^3$ scale using a combination of diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and structural magnetic resonance imaging scans. This manuscript summarizes a novel, scalable implementation of open-sou...

Graphs are quickly emerging as a leading abstraction for the representation of data. One important application domain originates from an emerging discipline called "connectomics". Connectomics studies the brain as a graph; vertices correspond to neurons (or collections thereof) and edges correspond to structural or functional connections between th...

The human brain and the neuronal networks comprising it are of immense interest to the scientific community. In this work, we focus on the structural connectivity of human brains, investigating sex differences across male and female connectomes (brain-graphs) for the knowledge discovery problem “Which brain regions exert differences in connectivity...

Objective: Blast-induced mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) commonly go undetected by computed tomography and conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This study was used to investigate functional brain network abnormalities in a group of blast-induced mTBI subjects using independent component analysis (ICA) of resting state functional MRI...

Background / Purpose: The goal of this work is to analyze the connectomes in order to understand how the brain functions. Are there differences in the wiring between different people? Are all parts of the brain connected in the same way? Main conclusion: The size (number of edges), as well as the maximum eigenvalues of the brain graphs differ...

Based on neuro-imaging findings, we present a brain model for intelligence and a model for creativity and discuss how genius may emerge from the overlapping and the unique aspects of these models. Intelligence is associated with integrity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and creative achievement with lower volumes of the orbitofrontal cortex....

The aim of this study was to determine whether Libman-Sacks endocarditis is a pathogenic factor for cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). A cardioembolic pathogenesis of SLE CVD manifested as: 1) neuropsychiatric systemic lupus erythematosus (NPSLE), including stroke and transient ischemic attacks (TIA); 2) neurocogni...

Experts describe current perspectives and experimental approaches to understanding the neural bases of creativity. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging,...

Survey course available on ITunes U In Univ. of New Mexico library.

Graham Wallas first introduced a model of creative process in his work Art of Thought (1926) where he began to elucidate the process by which an individual cultivates creative thought. In the following decades, psychologists attempted to develop psychometric measures that could tap an individual’s creative capacity via specific cognitive domains, s...

Despite intensive study, the role of the dorsal medial frontal cortex (dMFC) in error monitoring and conflict processing remains actively debated. The current experiment manipulated conflict type (stimulus conflict only or stimulus and response selection conflict) and utilized a novel modeling approach to isolate error and conflict variance during...

The Corpus Callosum (CC)—the largest bundle of nerve fibers connecting the right and left hemisphere—facilitates motor, sensory, and cognitive functioning. It is located at the bottom of the longitudinal fissures and covered by the cingulate gyrus. Recent studies have categorized the CC into five clusters projecting to discrete cortical regions: ge...

Non invasive brain stimulation(NIBS) will provide new treatment methods for neurological disorders with symptoms such as chronic pain, depression, and anxiety. This emerging medical application of electro-technology has shown the potential to have an enduring impact on society.

We present constrained source-based morphometry (SBM), a multivariate semiblind data-driven approach, to explore a possible brain-wide structural network in both gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) associated with the functional default mode network (DMN). With this approach, we utilize seed regions associated with the DMN as constraints on GM m...

To further understanding of basic and complex cognitive functions, previous connectome research has identified functional and structural connections of the human brain. Functional connectivity is often measured by using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and is generally interpreted as an indirect measure of neuronal acti...

Patients diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus have similar levels of neuropsychological dysfunction (i.e., 20-50%) as those with Neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (NPSLE). We hypothesized a gradient between cognition and white matter integrity, such that strongest brain-behavior relationships would emerge in NPSLE, intermediate i...

To investigate the biochemical correlates of normal personality we utilized proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ((1)H-MRS). Our sample consisted of 60 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 32 (27 females). Personality was assessed with the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). We measured brain biochemistry within the precuneus, the cingulate cortex...

A 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging study at 3T and short echo time was conducted to evaluate both the reproducibility, as measured by the interscan coefficient of variation (CV), and test-retest reliability, as measured by the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), of measurements of glutamate (Glu), combined glutamate and glutamine (...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) is a non-invasive form of brain stimulation applied via a weak electrical current passed between electrodes on the scalp. In recent studies, TDCS has been shown to improve learning when applied to the prefrontal cortex (e.g., Kincses et al. in Neuropsychologia 42:113-117, 2003; Clark et al. Neuroimage...