Shadowing Practice: The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans | Daniel Amen | TEDxOrangeCoast - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C2
Reviewer Gopal In this talk,
⏸ Paused
Speed:
All Sentences176 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Reviewer Gopal In this talk,
2
I'm going to give you the single most important lesson my colleagues and I have learned from looking at 83,000 brain scans.
3
But first, let me put the lesson into context.
4
I am in the middle of seven children.
5
Growing up, my father called me a maverick,
6
which to him was not a good thing.
7
In 1972, the Army called my number,
8
and I was trained as an infantry medic,
9
where my love of medicine was born.
10
But since I truly hated the idea of being shot at,
11
or sleeping in the mud,
12
I got myself retrained as an X-ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging.
13
As our professors used to say,
14
how do you know unless you look?
15
In 1979, when I was a second-year medical student,
16
someone in my family became seriously suicidal,
17
and I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist.
18
Over time, I realized that if he helped her,
19
which he did, it would not only save her life,
20
but it would also help her children and even her future grandchildren
21
as they would be shaped by someone who is happier and more stable.
22
I fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it had the potential to change generations of people.
23
In 1991, I went to my first lecture on brain SPECT imaging.
24
SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity.
25
It looks at how your brain works.
26
SPECT was presented as a tool to help psychiatrists get more information to help their patients.
27
In that one lecture, my two professional loves,
28
medical imaging and psychiatry, came together and quite honestly revolutionized my life Over the next 22 years,
29
my colleagues and I would build the world's largest database of brain scans related to behavior on patients from 93 countries.
30
SPECT basically tells us three things about the brain.
31
Good activity, too little or too much.
32
Here is a set of healthy SPECT scans.
33
The image on the left shows the outside surface of the brain,
34
and a healthy scan shows full, even, symmetrical activity.
35
The color is not important,
36
it's the shape that matters.
37
In the image on the right,
38
red equals the areas of high activity,
39
and in a healthy brain,
40
they're typically in the back part of the brain.
41
Here is a healthy scan compared to someone who had two strokes.
42
You can see the holes of activity.
43
Here's what Alzheimer's looks like,
44
where the back half of the brain is deteriorating.
45
Did you know that Alzheimer's disease actually starts in the brain 30 to 50 years before you have any symptoms?
46
Here's a scan of traumatic brain injury.
47
Your brain is soft and your skull is really hard.
48
Or drug abuse.
49
The real reason not to use drugs?
50
They damage your brain.
51
Obsessive compulsive disorder where the front part of the brain typically works too hard so that people cannot turn off their thoughts.
52
And epilepsy where we we frequently see areas of increased activity.
53
In 1992, I went to an all-day conference on brain SPECT imaging.
54
It was amazing and mirrored our own early experience using SPECT in psychiatry.
55
But at that same meeting,
56
researchers started to complain loudly that clinical psychiatrists like me should not be doing scans,
57
that they were only for their research.
58
Being a maverick and having clinical experience,
59
I thought that was a really dumb idea.
60
Without imaging, psychiatrists then and even now make diagnoses like they did in 1840 when Abraham Lincoln was depressed
61
by talking to people and looking for symptom clusters.
62
Imogene was showing us there was a better way.
63
Did you know that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that virtually never look at the organ they treat?
64
Think about it.
65
Cardiologists look, neurologists look, orthopedic doctors look,
66
virtually every other medical specialty's look.
67
psychiatrist gets.
68
Before imaging, I always felt like I was throwing darts in the dark at my patients and had hurt some of them,
69
which horrified me.
70
There is a reason that most psychiatric medications have black box warnings.
71
Give them to the wrong person and you can precipitate a disaster.
72
Early on our imaging work taught us many important lessons such as illnesses like ADHD,
73
anxiety, depression and addictions are not single or simple disorders in the brain.
74
They all have multiple types.
75
For example, here are two patients who have been diagnosed with major depression
76
that had virtually the same symptoms yet radically different brains.
77
One had really low activity in the brain,
78
the other one had really high activity.
79
How would you ever know what to do for them unless you actually looked?
80
It needs to be tailored to individual brains, not clusters of symptoms.
81
Our imaging work also taught us
82
that mild traumatic brain injury was a major cause of psychiatric illness
83
that ruined people's lives and virtually no one knew about it because they would seize psychiatrists for things like temper problems,
84
anxiety, depression, insomnia and they would never look so they would never know.
85
Here's a scan of a 15 year old boy who fell down a flight of stairs at the age of three.
86
And even though he was unconscious for only a few minutes,
87
There was nothing mild about the enduring effect that injury had on this boy's life.
88
When I met him at the age of 15,
89
he had just been kicked out of his third residential treatment program for violence.
90
He needed a brain rehabilitation program,
91
not just more medication thrown at him in the dark or behavior therapy,
92
which if you think about it, is really cruel.
93
To put him on a behavior therapy program when behavior is really an expression of the problem,
94
it's not the problem.
95
Researchers have found that undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of homelessness,
96
alcohol abuse, depression, panic attacks, ADHD, and suicide.
97
We are in for a pending disaster with the hundreds of thousands of soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan,
98
and virtually no one is looking at the function of their brain.
99
As we continued our work with SPECT,
100
the criticism grew louder, but so did the lessons.
101
Judges and defense attorneys sought our help to understand criminal behavior.
102
To date, we have scanned over 500 convicted felons, including 90 murderers.
103
Our work taught us that people who do bad things often have troubled brains.
104
That was not a surprise.
105
But what did surprise us was that many of these brains could be rehabilitated.
106
So here's a radical idea.
107
What if we evaluated and treated troubled brains rather than simply warehousing them in toxic, stressful environments?
108
In my experience, we could save tremendous amounts of money by making these people more functional,
109
so when they left prison,
110
they could work, support their families, and pay taxes.
111
Dostoevsky once said, a society should be judged not by how well it treats its outstanding citizens,
112
but by how it treats its criminals.
113
Instead of just crime and punishment,
114
we should be thinking about crime evaluation and treatment.
115
So after 22 years and 83,000 scans,
116
the single most important lesson my colleagues and I have learned is that you can literally change people's brains.
117
And when you do, you change their life.
118
You are not stuck with the brain you have.
119
You can make it better,
120
and we can prove it.
121
My colleagues and I performed the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players,
122
showing high levels of damage in these players at a time when the NFL said they didn't know
123
if playing football caused long-term brain damage.
124
The fact was they didn't want to know.
125
That was not a surprise.
126
I think if you get most thoughtful nine-year-olds together and you talk about
127
the brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter,
128
it's housed in a really hard skull that has many sharp bony ridges,
129
you know, 28 out of 39 year olds would go,
130
probably a bad idea for your life.
131
But what really got us excited was the second part of
132
the study where we put players on a brain smart program
133
and demonstrated that 80% of them could improve in the areas of blood flow,
134
memory, and mood, that you are not stuck with the brain you have.
135
You can make it better on a Brain Smart program.
136
How exciting is that?
137
I am so excited.
138
Reversing brain damage is a very exciting new frontier,
139
but the implications are really much wider.
140
Here is the scan of a teenage girl who has ADHD,
141
who was cutting herself, failing in school,
142
and fighting with her parents.
143
When we improved her brain,
144
she went from D's and F's to A's and B's and was much more emotionally stable.
145
Here's a scan of Nancy.
146
Nancy had been diagnosed with dementia,
147
and her doctor told her husband that he should find a home for her because within a year,
148
she would not know his name.
149
But on an intensive brain rehabilitation program,
150
Nancy's brain was better, as was her memory.
151
And four years later, Nancy still knows her husband's name.
152
Or my favorite story to illustrate this point is Andrew,
153
a nine-year-old boy who attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason,
154
and at the time was drawing pictures of himself hanging from a tree and shooting other children.
155
Andrew was Columbine, Aurora, and Sandy Hook waiting to happen.
156
Most psychiatrists would have medicated Andrew as they did Eric Harris
157
and the other mass shooters before they committed their awful crimes
158
but SPECT imaging taught me that I had to look at his brain
159
and not throw darts in the dark at him to understand
160
what he needed his SPECT scan showed a cyst the size
161
of a golf ball occupying the space of his left him for love.
162
No amount of medication or therapy would have helped Andrew.
163
When the cyst was removed,
164
his behavior completely went back to normal,
165
and he became the sweet,
166
loving boy he always wanted to be.
167
Now 18 years later, Andrew,
168
who is my nephew, owns his own home,
169
is employed, and pays taxes.
170
because someone bothered to look at his brain.
171
He has been a better son and will be a better husband, father, and grandfather.
172
When you have the privilege of changing someone's brain,
173
you not only change his or her life,
174
you have the opportunity to change generations to come.
175
I'm Dr. Daniel Amen.
176
Thank you.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
4.9/5 on App Store & Google Play
Shadowing English
On Mobile
Learn English anytime, anywhere with the Shadowing English app. Improve your communication skills today!
Track your learning progress
AI grading and error correction
Rich video library
Why practice speaking with this video?
Engaging with Daniel Amen's TEDx talk on brain scans can significantly enhance your English speaking skills, especially through the shadowing technique. By listening to his presentation, learners not only gain insights into mental health and psychiatry but also practice critical speaking contexts. The content covers real-life applications of medical imaging and its implications, fostering rich vocabulary and expressions. Emulating Amen’s delivery can improve fluency and confidence, making this a valuable resource for IELTS speaking practice. Incorporating the technique of shadowspeak allows you to mirror the speaker's intonation and pacing, which is essential for natural conversational English.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Amen's talk is rich in diverse grammatical structures and expressions that provide excellent learning opportunities:
- Complex sentences: "If he helped her, which he did, it would not only save her life, but it would also help her children." This sentence structure showcases conditional forms and relative clauses, both of which are pivotal for advanced English learners.
- Comparative and contrastive expressions: "One had really low activity in the brain, the other one had really high activity." This emphasizes the importance of contrasting ideas, an important skill for tasks like IELTS speaking.
- Descriptive language: "The outside surface of the brain, and a healthy scan shows full, even, symmetrical activity." Not only does this build vocabulary, but it also highlights descriptive qualities critical for effective communication.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While practicing your speaking skills, pay attention to certain words and phrases that may present pronunciation challenges:
- SPECT: This acronym (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) may be mispronounced; focus on articulating each letter clearly.
- Maverick: Ensure that you correctly emphasize the first syllable, pronounced as "MAV-er-ick." This word appears multiple times, making it essential for pronunciation practice.
- Psychiatry: It's easy to rush through this term; practice breaking it down into syllables: "psy-CHI-a-try.” Enunciating this correctly will enhance your professionalism in discussions.
Utilizing these insights from Amen’s talk will make your shadow speech practice easier and more effective, transforming complex ideas into understandable conversation. Remember to articulate clearly as you mimic and adapt to this engaging material!
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏