Jordan Theriault’s work focuses on the brain as a self-regulating system. He is particularly interested in the brain-based metabolic costs of information encoding, as well as their implications for mental health and the interpretation of functional neuroimaging research.
Dr. Theriault uses neuroimaging technologies to quantify brain metabolism and to image functional changes in brainstem regions that are critical for interoceptive control. These neuroimaging technologies include high-resolution 7 Tesla imaging, as well as innovations in simultaneous PET/MR imaging that allow for single-session measures of cerebral blood flow, BOLD signal intensity, absolute glucose metabolism, and absolute oxygen metabolism during task and rest.
His theoretical work has focused on the brain’s role in predicting sensory input, and in regulating the body. One implication of this approach is that a more predictable environment is, often, a more metabolically efficient environment. This implication has a great deal of relevance to mental and physical health, and can even help to make sense of social dynamics (e.g., conformity and social pressure) that have been difficult to describe by traditional means.