Amanda Duffy: A Picture of My Brain
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2016
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Neuroscientist Amanda Duffy gets some surprising news about her brain when she volunteers to be a control in an MRI study. Amanda Marie Duffy is a graduate student at Brown University pursuing her Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Her research is focused on understanding mechanisms that underlie ALS disease progression and therapeutic intervention with the use of molecular, cellular, and behavioral techniques. In 2015, Amanda was named a fellow in the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Scholars Program. In 2014, Amanda was elected as Graduate Student Representative where she managed recruitment and served as a member of the admissions committee. Prior to graduate school, Amanda worked as a research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Division of Neurotherapeutics. Amanda graduated from Brown University with a Sc.B. in Neuroscience in 2009.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.9 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.4 | I felt. |
| 0:07.6 | And I just thought, well? |
| 0:10.5 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.8 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:29.0 | Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:50.2 | This week's stories from Amanda Duffy. It was recorded in March 2016 at AS-220 in Providence, Rhode Island, as part of Brain Week, Rhode Island. As a neuroscience graduate student at Brown, I think about the brain all the time. |
| 0:56.0 | I think about the concept of growth, how an infant's brain, the actual tangible substance, |
| 1:03.0 | slowly grows and transforms to accommodate its needs and given the chance its desires. It just delights me to think that my |
| 1:14.3 | brain encrypts my quirks, like becoming a card-carrying member of the Twilight Zone fan club. |
| 1:23.0 | My brain embeds my passions, like symbolically adopting Echo, a real-life killer whale. |
| 1:30.7 | And my brain encodes my obsessions, like singing and dancing to the Phantom of the Opera |
| 1:36.7 | every night when I was seven. |
| 1:40.0 | All of this is incorporated into the precise alignment, organization, and specific neural composition of brain matter that makes me, Amanda. |
| 1:52.2 | This personal quality of neuroscience is what led me to sign up as a control for an MRI study at Brown, where as compensation, I would receive $20 and a |
| 2:03.6 | picture of my brain. Before graduate school, I worked at Mass General Hospital as a research |
| 2:09.5 | assistant, where I learned how to conduct and analyze MRIs. Having seen so many different brains, I wanted to see my own. |
| 2:20.3 | On December 18, 2013, I walked into the MRI room and 45 minutes later, |
| 2:27.3 | popped back out, glad to have contributed my brain to science. |
| 2:31.3 | I couldn't wait to hear back with that PDF picture of my brain. |
| 2:37.0 | Within just an hour, surprisingly, I already had an email, but there was no attachment. As I read the words, I would like to talk to you briefly about your scan. |
... |
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