Uncovering the relationship between lifestyle, personality and brain structure

Danilo Bzdok, a researcher at The Neuro, McGill's Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, uses machine learning to identify patterns in human neurological and psychological data. One of his team's recent studies  analyzed personality profiles, demographic status and social lifestyle from a cohort of 40,000  UK Biobank  middle aged participants. Their research focused on how these factors are related to each other and to brain structure. Could you briefly describe the study design? This study is different from what has been done before, for the following reason. We look at three domains of day-to-day life at the same time. And that is a set of variables, rich variables that capture people's personality, rich variables to capture people's demographic status, and then a set of variables about their social behavior. These three factors are typically studied in isolation.