Neurolecture Seminar Series
Concussion and Repetitive Head Impacts in Collision Sports: Neurological Risks
Thomas A. Buckley, Ph.D.
Department of Kinesiology & Applied Physiology
University of Delaware
- October 28, 2021
- 3:00 p.m.
- Lombardi Building, Room 224A
There has been considerable attention in recent years to the lifelong effects of both concussions and repetitive head impacts on the long-term health of athletes, especially football and ice hockey players. Newspapers and TV news have highlighted tragic outcomes associated with longtime collision sport athletes like NFL stars Junior Seau and Dwight Clark. However, the scientific findings to date are more complex than a simple 'playing football causes brain damage' headline would suggest. This presentation will discuss the evidence of reduced neurological health and conflicting evidence of better life outcomes in former football players with a focus on the effects of youth sports participation.
The functional architecture of human visual cortex
Alex Puckett, Ph.D.,
School of Psychology
University of Queensland, Australia
- October 16, 2020
- 3:00 p.m.
- For Zoom information to join the presentation, please email Zoey lsherwood at zisherwood@unr.edu.
Our rich, unified visual experience is made possible only through the concerted activity of many, specialized cortical areas. In this talk, I will discuss two distinct but complementary studies aimed at better understanding the functional architecture of these visual areas in humans. For the first, I will discuss a wavelet-based approach for parametrically and subtly manipulating the complex statistical properties of natural scenes with a high degree of control and flexibility. Using fMRI, I'll then show how our cortical visual areas are differentially sensitive to these subtle manipulations. For the second project, I'll detail our recent work using fMRI data from a large cohort of participants (N = 181) to develop a deep neural network able to predict the retinotopic organization of human visual cortex. These predictions are made at the individual level, directly on a surface model of the cortex, and from underlying anatomical information alone.
The fine and not so fine detail of fMRI
Mark Schira, Ph.D.
School of Psychology
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
- November 17, 2020
- 2:00 p.m.
- For Zoom information to join the presentation, please email Zoey Isherwood at zisherwood@unr.edu.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging has become a widely available standard tool in Neuroscience. fMRI as we know it today started its widespread use around 1995 with a series of seminal yet independent works, demonstrating that fMRI can image the complex layout of the visual cortex through retinotopic mapping. While MRI hardware and sequences have evolved dramatically in the 25 years since then, the techniques and applications in neuroscience have not. Much like the early work, most fMRI recordings today use 3x3x3 mm, ignoring the potential modern scanners offer. In my presentation, I will talk about some basic concepts of noise in fMRI data, resolution, the evolution of scanning, and how it allows us high-resolution fMRI today. I will then present some results from our latest work using high-resolution fMRI on how BOLD and retinotopic maps change over cortical depth.