CNS 2025: Q&A with Marie Banich
Marie Banich’s journey in cognitive neuroscience started with very personal motivations: first from a curiosity about what her family’s propensity for left handedness meant and then to a drive to help people who suffer from unwanted thoughts, after witnessing the devastating effects that had on a loved one. But like many scientists, her path has been anything but linear.
In her upcoming talk to accept the 2025 Distinguished Career Contributions Award at the annual CNS in meeting in Boston, Banich will take the audience on a tour of the progression of her work, including the unexpected turns it took. The talk, titled “Cognitive Control: From Interacting Hemispheres to Purging Thoughts,” will set up how her dissertation work to understand differences between brain hemispheres turned into a quest to uncover the power of brain connectivity and how to eventually leverage it in clinical settings.
“How do I marshal the resources of the brain to get a task done?” says Banich of the University of Colorado Boulder. “That’s what I think of as cognitive control. And what came out of my early work was that it’s interactions between brain regions that have implications for control.”
That work laid the foundation for groundbreaking work on how the brain can purge unwanted thoughts, something I spoke with Banich about in 2023. In advance of CNS 2024, I spoke with her again to learn more about her early interest and work in cognitive neuroscience, how the work might translate to individuals suffering from psychological distress, and what she is looking forward to at the Boston meeting.
CNS: What got you interested in cognitive neuroscience in the first place?
Banich: In many ways, I got into the field because my mother was left handed. One of her sisters was left handed, and many of my cousins are left handed. So I grew up, hearing that left handed people were more creative and interesting, like Leonardo DaVinci, than right-handers like myself. I went to college planning on being a physician. However, in my first psychology class, I learned that the brains of left handers and right handers are different, and that’s when I realized that the brain could influence behavioral traits, and I found that fascinating.
I was a double major in biology and psychology. As my time in college drew to a close, I still planned to go to medical school. But then I realized that I didn’t care about the gastrointestinal system or the pulmonary system, and even within the nervous system, I really didn’t care about the spinal cord, but just the brain. So that’s how I ended up here.
CNS: The first part of your body of work was really about laying the foundation for understanding cognitive control. How did you eventually shift into more clinically oriented research?
Banich: To make that transition, I knew I needed to find a paradigm that is really flexible and would work with different populations. In my very unimaginative way, I picked the Stroop Task because it’s a robust behavioral phenomena, and most everybody can recognize colors – little kids, older people, people with brain damage.
The Stroop test is a good measure of cognitive control because it requires control at many different levels. At a basic level, to exert control you have to overcome the prepotent bias to read the word in order to identify the ink color. Then you have to exert control with regard to semantic information. For example, if I show you the word “red” in blue ink, red and blue conflict, right? So you’ve got to essentially exert control to pick the specific color associated with the ink, not the color associated with the word. And then finally, you have to exert control at the response level, picking the response associated with the ink color, like saying “blue” rather than saying “red”.
In one of our first MRI studies, we showed that when control was difficult, such as when you attended to the ink color instead of the word, activity in lateral prefrontal cortex increased compared to attending to the word. However, in later studies we found that the anterior cingulate cortex helps with control when selecting a response is hard, and that whether you need control at the level of the cingulate depends in part on how good a job your lateral prefrontal cortex has done in exerting control at other levels.
CNS: And so how did you take this model and apply it to the work on intentional forgetting?
Banich: When we think of exerting control, it often involves selecting one aspect of information and inhibiting or down-weighting other information. So one of the questions we became interested in was “How do we stop information from being retrieved from long term memory? This was a 2007 paper that we were super fortunate to get published in Science.
Basically we showed that there appears to be a generalized mechanism in prefrontal cortex that works to target brain regions to inhibit them. And we showed that connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus is important for inhibiting retrieval of information from long term memory.
Now this work was all about suppressing the retrieval of information from long term memory, which, in terms of psychiatric disorders, is most relevant for PTSD. But I really wanted to look at how to inhibit repetitive thoughts that are not necessarily related to long-term memory.
So, maybe three or four years after that initial paper was published, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought ‘I can do the same thing, but look at working memory.’ In that prior study we had used our knowledge of brain organization and the fact that the hippocampus is critical for long-term memory. But since working memory involves the reactivation of information stores in specific regions of the cortex, like the visual cortex when you are keeping an image in mind, I figured we could examine activity in that specific region of the brain. Once I had that insight, I kind of hit myself. Like, why did it take me half a decade to figure this out?
CNS: Your work has identified four distinct operations people can use to control unwanted thoughts: maintaining a thought, replacing a thought, clearing all thoughts, or suppressing a specific thought, and you have used that information to map the distinct neural patterns in the brain and identify more details about how that occurs for each. What is your vision for using this information to help people in the clinic?
Banich: We have found that the brain patterns associated with each of these operations is pretty consistent across people, providing a brain signature for each operation, which enables clinical translation. As part of our joint work, Jarrod Lewis-Peacock is starting a biofeedback experiment in the MRI, in which we will ask someone to remove an item in their mind through one of these operations and make a circle on the screen as large as possible; the better their brain pattern matches the prototypical pattern for that operation, the larger the circle will be.
Another avenue for potential clinical translation is that we are testing the hypothesis that the brain signatures for these operations might be muddled or less differentiated in people who self-report having trouble controlling their thoughts. If there aren’t clear lines between these control mechanisms, then we are hoping that biofeedback might make it possible to train individuals to have crisper representations of each operation.
In addition, one of my grad students is examining whether there are other operations that might help to remove information from the focus of your thoughts. One manipulation she is exploring is to focus your attention inward, on your breathing. The other manipulation is one in which you turn your focus outward to track a sinusoidal line that oscillates at the same periodicity as breathing. Our hope is that we can then figure out which removal operation work best for which types of people. For example, perhaps replacing a thought works best for someone with anxiety but following the sinusoid works best for someone with depression. So, we can start to really think about customizing the sort of interventions you decide to use in a clinical setting.
CNS: What are you excited about for the meeting in Boston?
Banich: It’s really special for me to be recognized by my peers. CNS is where I see my intellectual home. What I really love about this meeting is the way that the work presented here threads together cognitive science and neuroscience.
CNS: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Banich: It’s a funny coincidence but I’m really pleased that Ken Paller will also be honored at the meeting this year. Ken and I first met many years ago, when we both were invited to attend a meeting in Italy for junior scholars under 40. The meeting was held at a monastery in the Italian countryside, with long lunch breaks complete with wine. I forget exactly who discovered it, but it turned out that the monastery had tennis courts, and we asked to use them during lunch. So I first really got to know Ken on the tennis court. It feels a little full circle to have someone who is a friend also being recognized at this year’s meeting.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
