66th Annual STS (2006-2007)
Finalists
Oren Brecher

NEW YORK
Oren Brecher, 17, of Suffern, studied changes in areas of the brain that allow for perceptual learning for his Intel Science Talent Search project in behavioral and social sciences. Perceptual learning is an increase in a person's ability to understand commonly seen visual stimuli, and it is vital to understanding the visual environment. In his research, Oren used a functional MRI to measure brain activity in six human subjects while they observed new, or previously seen, displays of motion. By comparing brain activity across the learned and unlearned displays, he concluded that the brain achieves perceptual learning for visual motion by neural amplification in two specific regions specialized for the perceptual process: the medial temporal area and the inferior parietal lobule. A starting lineman on the varsity football team, he has been an award-winning varsity wrestler at Suffern High School. Oren plays a wide range of instruments including guitar, bass, banjo, trumpet and piano, for which he has composed music. The recipient of numerous honors, Oren is the son of Meir and Barbara Brecher. He hopes to attend Harvard or Cornell and pursue a career in neurobiology and medicine.