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| G3XBM's brain! |
Today I had my brain scanned for scientific research. For several years I've volunteered as a guinea pig at the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University. It involves doing the occasional language test and about once a year having an fMRI scan whilst doing some task involving language. The university has its own MRI unit for medical research. The whole MRI thing is painless and is actually rather relaxing, especially when they are doing a full scan and the machine is vibrating which is like having a massage. If anything untoward is seen in the scans they inform your doctor, which is good. Let's hope that it looks OK. Certainly it looks much like the one I had done a few years ago.
The purpose of the research is to better understand how the brain functions and they hope this will help with people recovering from strokes. It must be so rewarding to be working in this field either as a PhD student or as a post-doc researcher.
One of the things my xyl Olga is always commenting on is how the health service here does almost no prophylactic checking (compared to the Russian system she was used to.) About the only time you ever get a chest Xray, ECG or CT/MRI scan is when you end up in hospital with symptoms of a serious illness which earlier diagnosis might have prevented. So by volunteering to help research you are also improving your chances of discovering something malign early.
ReplyDeleteThere are definite disadvantages to living in the boonies...