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Indian-American Scientist Gets Grant For Brain Research
This problem gets more acute in difficult listening conditions such as a noisy room. While hearing aids amplify sound, they don't improve speech recognition because the brain itself has changed, he added.
"We hope to identify neuron types that seem to be lost or changed during ageing. There may be combinations of behavioral or pharmacological therapies that could delay or prevent these changes," Rezak said.
The grant will support research on how the brain's auditory cortex processes information about sound locations.
"Precise sound localization can be a matter of life and death," he explained. "The auditory cortex is necessary for sound localization, but our understanding of the relevant neural processing is rudimentary.
"Sound localization is also interesting from a computational perspective because we explore how neurons integrate inputs from the two ears."
The NSF funding will also allow Razak to investigate neural computations that generate cortical maps underlying sound localization behavior in the pallid bat.
"The pallid bat is a bit unusual among bats in that it uses echolocation for general orientation and obstacle avoidance, but listens for prey on the ground, like crickets, scorpions and millipedes," he said.
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Source: PTI
