Grad school often presents with odd opportunities
including sometimes being a part of other people's research
studies.
So when somebody offered me pictures
of my brain in exchange for helping out, I signed up.
Over the course of the past year,
I have been in and out of an fMRI scanner as a control
subject in somebody else's neuroscience study.
I get to be a normal control brain
that they compare things to.
The fMRI machine is located in the basement of Stanford's
infamous Jordan Hall.
Great.
And it looks like a giant metal donut.
MRI or magnetic resonance imaging
uses a combination of magnetic fields and radio waves
to create a very detailed picture of the brain.
The f in fMRI stands for functional,
and it tracks brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow
to different areas of the brain.
So when I get there, I first have
to make sure that all of the metal
is removed from my body and clothes
because the magnet in the MRI would pull strongly
at it potentially hurting me if it were
to say pull out an earring.
Then I get some earplugs because it is loud, really,
really loud, like louder than my lab fridge loud.
The magnet makes all kinds of thumps and bangs and pulses,
and so the earplugs are quite welcome.
Finally, I get blankets because the room is freezing,
and then I lie perfectly still as I
am positioned in the machine and pulled back into it.
When they're doing anatomical scans,
I get to watch fun stuff like Blue Planet
as you can see on the mirrored screen here.
But when they're doing the functional assays,
I'm often playing short games like this exciting one where
I watch a bunch of pictures flash by and hit
a button whenever I see a scrambled image.
And then after an hour or so of lying perfectly
still in a loud metal donut, I get to see my brain.
You can see some cool things.
So these are your temporal lobes.
Sorry that's the border between occipital lobe
and temporal lobe, parietal, frontal, cerebellum.
This is-- this little gray thing here is your hippocampus.
Oh, OK.
Then this is the brain stem, so pons, medulla, corpus callosum,
and spinal cord.
This is where it exits into your spine.
Tongue, tongues are really big.
Yeah, that actually always creeps me out a little.
This is my favorite is they eyes.
You can even see the lens.
Weird.
Yeah.
In fact, my desktop background for the past year or so
has been slices of my brain because that just
seems fitting to me.
Thank you to Jesse and Michael for letting
me be their weird control subject with a camera.
And thank you to my brain for being normal looking.
This is just one of those weird bits of grad school for you.
Go forth and be a data point.
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