This study investigates the temporal characteristics of the BOLD response in sensorimotor and auditory cortices during finger tapping tasks. The authors found that both cortical systems exhibit nonlinear responses, where the response to long stimuli cannot be accurately predicted by convolving the 1-second response with a rectangular function. The amplitude of the response varies slowly with stimulus duration in the short-time regime. Wiener deconvolution was used to deblur the response to concatenated short episodes of finger tapping at different rates, showing that while the measured response curves are distorted by overlap between episodes, the deconvolved response agrees well with separate scans at each rate. The study concludes that deconvolution can effectively reduce the hemodynamically induced temporal blurring and may have potential applications in quantifying responses in event-related fMRI. The impulse response must be measured for each subject using a short-stimulus paradigm to ensure accurate deconvolution.This study investigates the temporal characteristics of the BOLD response in sensorimotor and auditory cortices during finger tapping tasks. The authors found that both cortical systems exhibit nonlinear responses, where the response to long stimuli cannot be accurately predicted by convolving the 1-second response with a rectangular function. The amplitude of the response varies slowly with stimulus duration in the short-time regime. Wiener deconvolution was used to deblur the response to concatenated short episodes of finger tapping at different rates, showing that while the measured response curves are distorted by overlap between episodes, the deconvolved response agrees well with separate scans at each rate. The study concludes that deconvolution can effectively reduce the hemodynamically induced temporal blurring and may have potential applications in quantifying responses in event-related fMRI. The impulse response must be measured for each subject using a short-stimulus paradigm to ensure accurate deconvolution.