Name: I Got To See And Hold My Brain
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:12:21.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- The final guest video in this run is from Alie and Micah,

a neuroscientist and a clinical therapist who run Neuro Transmissions.

Their video has giant magnets, 3D printing, and a Star Wars action figure.

- We're here at the Keck Center at UC San Diego.

And this is a functional magnetic resonance imager, or an fMRI.

that's used for educational and training purposes.

An actual fMRI machine houses a 3-Tesla magnet

that's more than 60,000 times more powerful than the Earth's magnetic field.

And over 3,000 times more powerful than your average fridge magnet.

well, we would put our camera and our equipment at serious risk.

- But why on earth would anyone possibly need a magnet so powerful?

at UCSD are using fMRI to study the human brain

in ways that 30 years ago just weren't even possible.

- I'm Maggie, I'm a fourth-year graduate student at UC San Diego.

I'm a sixth-year PhD student in John Serences' lab.

- We study mostly selective attention and expectation and other cognitive factors

and how they influence visual processing in humans.

- My research is about really basic visual perception.

How do we make sense of the world around us?

How do we choose, out of the plethora of things

that are constantly accosting our visual system,

how does your brain make sense of the massive amount of information

fMRI itself was developed not very long ago,

it's a very new technique, as far as human research goes.

And it was developed in the '90s, I believe, actually in Bell Labs.

- fMRI is a particular specialty of MRI called functional MRI,

so what that does is basically, instead of measuring the difference

between particular tissues, you're actually optimising

to detect the difference between oxygenated vs. deoxygenated blood

- For a long time, it was impossible to look at the brain up close

And even if you got a brain from someone who's passed on, that's not all that useful

When Leonardo Da Vinci dissected the human brain in the 16th century

it was with the intention of finding the seat of the human soul.

of different brain areas were essentially a mystery

But fMRI changed all that by giving scientists

the ability to see the brain working in real time,

track activities in different brain regions,

- No, unfortunately not for us scientists, an fMRI machine cannot read the mind.

It can tell you basically where blood is being transported to in the brain.

- An fMRI scan can tell you when someone is doing some cognitive task,

what kind of patterns of brain activity you see.

So which areas are active, what information are those areas representing.

For instance, if you have someone look at different images and you measure MRI

while they do that, then later if you have that same person come in and you say,

Now, based on that information, I can guess what you were thinking about.

- I could probably say you're looking to the left

or I could say you're looking at a horizontal line

However, am I gonna be able to tell what you're daydreaming about

or who you're in love with or something like that?

No, I don't think think that's gonna happen in my lifetime but, you know,

I said it on camera so we'll be able to... [laughs].

- It might not quite make sense how a magnet does all of this,

so let's break down the process step by step.

some neurologically linked problems and a doctor refers her for an fMRI.

All of her Force powers are messing with her head.

"Oh no, Kylo Ren keeps appearing in my mind!

"I can't stop thinking about his hot torso.

- The technicians place her on the table,

give her some earplugs and stabilise her head

If the head moves during the scan, the images will come out fuzzy.

Next, the table slides into this large, doughnut-shaped

section which houses the ultra-powerful magnet.

then actually turns the hydrogen atoms in our blood.

- Yeah, the human body has a lot of hydrogen atoms because well,

we're mostly made up of H₂O, that's water.

The magnetic field from the fMRI interacts with the protons in the hydrogen atoms

and makes those protons essentially point in the same direction.

That's right, your molecules are magnetic.

- Once Rey's in position, she'll hear a series

But these sounds aren't just the hottest new beat,

Every clang you hear is a radio wave pulse being fired off.

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I Got To See And Hold My Brain

constantly

cognitive

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