Can’t Find a Subject? A Professor Scanned His Own Brain 100+ Times — and Launched a Precision‑Neuroimaging Trend

Self‑experiment that changed a field

In 2012 Russell Poldrack scanned his own brain repeatedly — more than 100 fMRI sessions across 18 months — because he could not find volunteers willing to commit to daily imaging. Short sentence. Why scan yourself? Because he wanted data the field had largely ignored: how a single healthy brain fluctuates over time. The project, later published as the MyConnectome dataset and related papers, reportedly produced a resource that dozens of researchers have since mined and that has been cited hundreds of times.

From group averages to "precision scanning"

For three decades after the first functional MRI paper in 1992, human neuroimaging emphasized large cohorts and population averages. Poldrack’s approach flipped that script: dense, longitudinal scanning of one individual combined with blood‑based omics measurements to link brain connectivity to gene expression and metabolism. It has been reported that his open dataset helped demonstrate that individual brains can deviate substantially from the “group brain” and that those idiosyncrasies are stable and meaningful — a finding with obvious implications for psychiatry and neurodegenerative disease research.

A modest basement scan that became contagious

The idea proved contagious. Graduate students and early‑career faculty adapted the method. Timothy Laumann used Poldrack’s data to show single‑subject network organization is resolvable given enough scans. Later the Midnight Scan Club — a group of researchers who paid reduced night‑time scanner fees and scanned 10 volunteers intensively — showed similar individual specificity. It has been reported that the Midnight Scan Club study cost roughly $12,000 and confirmed that averaged group maps do not capture individual network structure.

Why it matters now

Is this the future of human neuroimaging? Precision scanning raises promise — and questions. Dense sampling may refine diagnoses and personalized treatment, but self‑experimenting and high‑frequency scanning also pose ethical, logistical and regulatory issues: what are the long‑term effects of repeated MRI exposure, and who pays for the intense data collection? Poldrack himself has said he was surprised by how rapidly the idea spread. What began as a pragmatic, somewhat “ruthless” fix to a recruitment problem has nudged the field toward asking a new kind of question: how unique is your brain — and can that uniqueness be useful?