The objective of the proposed research is to develop and implement an fMRI method capable of delivering information on anatomically specific brain activities back to a subject in near real-time as biofeedback, thus enabling neurofeedback. Guided by the information on their own cortical activities, the subjects subsequently learn to gain a level of voluntary control in modulating brain activities of auditory and somatomotor areas using cognitive functions such as attention and imagery. The main hypothesis of this study is that the level of attention to auditory stimulation and the content of motor imagery can be voluntarily controlled by the subjects, thus modulating the activities in auditory and somatomotor areas that are characterized by fMRI. The secondary hypothesis is that biofeedback of regionally specific brain function will assist subjects to achieve a greater degree of modulation compared to subjects without neurofeedback. The tertiary hypothesis is that subjects can retain or further enhance the degree of cortical modulation learned from the initial neurofeedback sessions by mental practice in the absence of additional neurofeedback. We will implement an fMRI method to quantify brain activation, delineate the targeted brain areas-of-interest, and enable quantitative scales of brain activities to be fed back to the subjects in the form of graphical/auditory information. The MR parameters and task paradigm will be optimized by implementing, testing, and modifying the cycle of the experiment on 20 volunteer subjects using an auditory attention task. Upon the completion of implementation, we will apply the neurofeedback fMRI method to 15 healthy volunteer subjects undergoing auditory attention and motor imagery tasks. We will modulate subjects' brain activities, in terms of an increase/decrease in the size of activation and/or blood-oxygenation-level-dependent signal contrast, in primary and secondary auditory areas during passive auditory stimulation by assigning different degrees of attention/distraction to incoming stimuli. The activities in somatomotor areas will be modulated using motor imagery. The efficacy of the neurofeedback approach will be examined by comparing the functional brain mapping data to that obtained from demographically matched subjects who perform the task without the guidance of neurofeedback. We will also examine whether the degree of modulation achieved from the neurofeedback procedures can be consolidated and retained over time by performing the second fMR/session to measure the degree of modulatory changes learned from the initial neurofeedback sessions.
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