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I am a second-year chemistry major and biology minor .4 in the College of Arts and Sciences. I am a first year Gaines Fellow, a National Merit Scholar, and a Singletary Scholar. I am employed by the Thomas D. Clark Study as a tutor of the biological, chemical, and physical sciences. I am also a member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society and Phi Delta Theta social fraternity. In the summer of 2004,1 was granted a Neuroengineering Summer Research Program fel-lowship by the National Science Foundation to work at UCLA's Brain Mapping Institute. This paper is a summary of my work with Dr. Mark Cohen and Jennifer Bramen whose endless patience and supportive mentoring made it possible for me to jump into an otherwise highly specialized field. I have presented the findings at UCLA's Summer Program for Undergraduate Research and to the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience. My abstract has been cited by UCLA's Center for Academic Excellence.

My driving passion in life is to understand the human brain as both an organic tissue and a self-aware subjective entity. At the University of Kentucky, I strive to do this through my research into the biochemical basis of Alzheimer's Disease. At UCLA, I sought to explore the brain macroscopically through functional magnetic resonance imaging. Eventually, I want to become a research physi¬cian in the hopes of exploring consciousness at the point where neurochemistry and neuroimaging articulate.

Faculty Mentor:

Mark S. Cohen, Ph.D., Professor, UCLA School of Medicine

along with Jennifer E. Bramen, graduate student

During the summer of 2004,1 sponsored Yuriy Bronshteyn to visit in my labora¬tory to participate in research and to gain experience in neuroimaging. While here, he worked largely under the direction of my graduate fellow, Jennifer Bramen, in support of her graduate studies on the neurology of time perception and estimation. Yuriy gained a strong and satisfying understanding of the ex¬periments and their underlying neuroscience, as well as of the fMRI method. Since then, he has prepared a report on his studies entitled, "Distributed Task Related BOLD Signal During Auditory Sub-second Timing" that I have had the chance to read and to review, but which he authored solely. His analysis and perception of the work is quite excellent and he has made observations and interpretations that go beyond the original experimental design. The indepen¬dent reading and thought that has gone into to this is significantly beyond what I expect from students at this stage in their career.

Abstract

The brain's input/output functions depend heavily on temporal processing. We sought to identify regions of the brain active in task performance during temporal discrimination of a sub-second auditory interval. We presented ten subjects with 40 paired tones and asked them to judge whether these comparison intervals were longer or shorter than a 100 ms standard. We then localized correlations between the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent signal and task performance across subjects using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. We saw no task-related frontal cortex activation and significant activation of traditional auditory areas. Auditory regions included the bilateral superior and middle temporal gyri (STG and MTG): Brodmann areas (BA) 21, 22, 38, 41, and 42. The signals within the left hemispheric insula, precentral gyrus, inferior and superior parietal lobes and right hemispheric postcentral gyrus were also correlated with the task. Unexpectedly, visual areas were also activated, including the right hemispheric cuneus, middle occipital gyrus and bilateral precuneus: BA 7, 18 & 19. Most interestingly, the activation of the STG, MTG, precentral gyrus and insula — areas implicated in verbal memory, language and reading — suggests a possible co-localization of function between sub-second temporal processing and written language comprehension. This study thus corroborates the long speculated hypothesis that certain language-based learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, may be caused by deficits in temporal processing.