Fred Helmstetter likes to look at brains, and if you’re a psychology undergraduate student, he may be looking at yours soon.

Over the past 10 years, Helmstetter, a professor in the psychology department, has looked at the results of thousands of brains, mostly of students, mapping the brains the same way a neurologist would.

To do so, Helmstetter uses functional magnetic resonance imaging at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The results of doing so, he says, can help provide insight into metabolic symbols. Those symbols can sometimes show how different parts of the brain work and how everyday use of the brain can work into those parts.

Helmstetter and his team of five psychology graduate student assistants can tune the machine and program it to measure the local ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood.

This blood sample, he says, can infer activity.

“Cells are working harder, breathing for more blood,” he says. “That’s what’s measured.”

He uses the signals of where the brain is pumping in blood by using a technique called the blood oxygenated level dependent contrast to see how those parts of the brain correspond to everyday activity. Signals of where the brain is pumping in blood help show how the brain reacts when it attempts to perform different functions.

Helmstetter says that there are theories about different parts of the brain.

Individual sections of the brain “should be more active when performing memory,” he says.

He then checks to see if there is an increase in that part of the brain in a normal subject, and can take the results and see how it measures up against individuals who have a deficiency in the particular area of the brain.

He also looks at the connectivity of the brain and “how does the whole brain look,” he says.

Helmstetter studies two different subjects: rats and humans.

He says he has discovered some of the processes connected with certain brain regions. The hippocampus, he says, is where episodic memory — your name, your phone number, your address — occurs.

“It helps you remember the chair that you sat in a week ago,” Helmstetter says.

He says that if there is some sort of emotional importance attached to a person, place, event or thing, you will probably remember it better.

He has helped published a paper titled, “Amygdala and Hippocampal Activity During Acquisition and Extinction of Human Fear Conditioning.” This paper is based, in part, on his findings.

DNA is a “blueprint for life,” Helmstetter says. It helps impacts behavior, but the “nature end of things is not a one-way street. Genetics determine behavior as well.”

Helmstetter says he can measure specifics in rats and measure the protein contents in cells that are of particular interest. That way, he says, he can get a feel for how the brain works.

“It’s (human and rat brain activity) essentially two sides of the same coin,” he says.

Georgette Gafford, a psychology graduate student who has been assisting Helmstetter on the project for seven years, says she enjoys working with the rats and, as a psychology student, did not realize how much she would enjoy the molecular aspects of the research.

Helmstetter uses $1.47 million in grant money from the National Institute of Mental Health to look at rats. The grant began in March 2005 and lasts until 2011. Funding for the human part of his research is continuing through interim money while he awaits word for his review of funding, scheduled for July 1.

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