Aviva Hope Rutkin: Sensory substitution
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2013
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For her masters thesis in science writing, Aviva Hope Rutkin starts writing about sensory substitution -- a way of swapping in one sense for another. But her work leads to a mysterious Dr. Bach-y-Rita and a whole new way of knowing someone. Aviva Hope Rutkin writes about science and technology for the MIT Technology Review and The Raptor Lab. She has previously interned at Nature Publishing Group, Time, NASA, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. She studied neuroscience and Chinese at Union College, where she wrote her first thesis on interactive fiction. In the fall, she will graduate with a Master's in Science Writing from MIT. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt... |
| 0:08.0 | ...and I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | ...theid... Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:32.7 | This week's story is from Aviva Hope Rutkin. The story was recorded in August 2013 at Oberon in |
| 0:39.4 | Cambridge, Massachusetts as part of a partnership with WBUR. The theme of the evening was small things. |
| 0:49.7 | All right. When some people hear that I'm a graduate student at MIT, they think I must be doing huge, world-changing stuff, |
| 0:58.0 | you know, inventing the next internet, carrying a disease, |
| 1:02.0 | building the robot that'll eventually take all of your jobs. |
| 1:06.0 | But me, no, I spent all my time in graduate school |
| 1:10.0 | obsessing over one man who most people have never even heard of. |
| 1:15.4 | That wasn't my intention, I had big dreams too. |
| 1:18.1 | I was going to go into the science writing program, |
| 1:21.3 | bring science to the scientifically illiterate, |
| 1:23.6 | make it accessible and human and interesting, |
| 1:26.3 | and if along the way I become a famous |
| 1:28.6 | and beloved writer and mortalize my name forever, so be it. I'm especially interested in kind |
| 1:36.4 | of weird, offbeat inventions. I wanted to do my thesis in the beginning on this thing called |
... |
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