Neurosalience #S3E12 with Matthew Wall - Sex, drugs, & fMRI

Today, our guest is Dr. Matthew Wall, head of MRI applications at Invicro, a London-based company that explores ways to advance personalized medicine.

Matthew received his Ph.D. in 2003 in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Cambridge and until 2006, performed a post doc at Royal Holloway. He joined the company, Glaxo-Smith Kline in 2009, which then became Imanova in 2012 and then more recently, Invicro.

Dr. Wall is a medical imaging specialist - working on both methods and applications - and mostly using fMRI. HIs initial training was in experimental psychology, but he's since studied vision, pain, fMRI-methodologies, resting-state fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. Recently he’s been involved in research on psychedelics, cannabis, sex hormones, depression, weight-loss, neurodegenerative disorders, and sexual function.

His current role at Invicro allows him the opportunity to be involved in a number of clinical and non-clinical research projects, from commercial early Phase I clinical trials, to pure academic work.

Today we have a broad ranging conversation about the challenges of fMRI in generating biomarkers and how the central challenge is shaping up to be more fully characterizing and understanding the many dimensions of human variability. We also get into a great discussion on psilocybin and his brain imaging work towards understanding how it alleviates depression. We then talk about cannabis, as well as his more recent work on understanding the neural correlates of various treatments to reduce hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

Brain Art

Artist: Dan White
Title: Neurotrip

Author’s Description: OHBM Brain Art Video Entry: https://o8t.wistia.com/medias/kulnjqe2ty

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