Who Am I?

My name is Sara Naqvi. I am a freshman at University of California in Davis and I previously attended Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins, Colorado. Here is what sparked my interest in the brain:

Being one of the most iconic snowboarders in the world, a lot of people know of Shaun White. Very few people know of Kevin Pearce. Prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, it was actually Kevin Pearce that was being watched closely, considered even to overtake Shaun White’s throne at the top of the sport. He had even received a sponsorship from Nike who envisioned a new face for the sport. But on New Year’s Eve of 2009 at Park City, Kevin Pearce “faceplanted” while attempting a stunt. He suffered what was then called a concussion, a medical condition that is referred to now as traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Shaun White went on to win a gold medal in the halfpipe. Kevin Pearce never competed. He could not speak or comprehend anything after the accident.

My friend Patty suffered TBI while playing volleyball. Two days later, she was back at her sport. Kevin Pearce had to be flown to a medical center and then admitted to a rehabilitation hospital. He was not able to return home until June 2010. To say that Patty and Kevin Pearce both suffered TBI tells us one thing- that we know almost nothing about TBI. And we know almost nothing about the brain.

I suffered two concussions in my sport of synchronized swimming. With numerous people swimming closely and performing complicated figures both in and above the water, it is quite common for swimmers to have their head struck by another, or even smash into another’s head. My TBI manifested by days of brain fog, inability to tolerate bright lights or loud sounds, and a feeling of almost overwhelming fatigue. On the spectrum of TBI, I fell somewhere between Patty and Kevin Pearce.

But I wondered what happened to create this spectrum?

Anatomic imaging shows nothing, so there was no part that is “broken”. Was it the severity of the hit, a specific part of the brain that was injured, level of inflammation, the body’s way of conferring protection? I thought deeply about what could be going on. My brain was spending a lot of time thinking about my brain.

I also suffer from dyslexia. Words in a sentence do not really flow for me. My eyes flip back and forth. My eyes see the top of a paragraph, and then the bottom, and then the middle, top, bottom…. I put together the pieces to figure out what the author is saying. I am not sure how long I have had dyslexia, probably forever. When I began to explain how I read, people would stare at me and say, “What are you talking about?”. It is clear that the neurons in my brain do not flow as smoothly as someone without dyslexia.

But once again, I wondered why? My brain was back to thinking about what was happening in my brain.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in January 2023, halfway through my junior year in high school. This diagnosis came as a shock to both my parents and me. I have always excelled in school, being in the gifted and talented program for both math and reading since elementary school. However, in the months since my diagnosis, I began to realize why I struggled with spelling, and to be honest, reading and comprehending long passages. Growing up, I probably learned to compensate for my reading disability without even being conscious of it, however, as the material in school has become increasingly more difficult and lengthier, it sometimes takes me twice or three times as long to read and comprehend my schoolwork. It also made me realize that I may not be reaching my full potential because of my disability. Recently, my interest in dyslexia and the functioning of the brain has grown.

I believe that my fascination with how the brain functions is driven by how little we know about it. For my studies and hopefully my career, I want to focus on understanding the brain. The diseases that affect the brain, from TBI to depression to Alzheimer’s, are a function of some disruption of neurons or neuroreceptors, but we really do not know much more. Just as we have discovered distant galaxies, what lies at the depth of the ocean, and what composes the atoms that make up everything, I believe that our understanding of the brain is one of the biggest challenges my generation will face.

I like math. And I like brains. I would like to combine those two disciplines and try to figure out more about what happens in our heads. The brain has 100 billion neurons, as many as there are stars in our galaxy or the number of grains of sand that would cover half a tennis court one meter high. Because of this massive number, it might seem that understanding how this works would be impossible. But there is one fact that gives me hope that understanding how these neurons work is not impossible- the fact that there are 100 billion and not infinity.

We have a limit, we have a target, and we have math. I believe that we can construct models, very complicated models, that might help us to understand the complexity of how those billions of neurons work together to make our brain work. And from there, maybe we can understand why sometimes the brain does not work. And from there, maybe we can understand why sometimes the brain does not work. Fortunately, there are “gurus” and neuroscience Yoda’s out there, like the professors I spoke to (see SARA Talks), and I want to learn from them.