{"id":146782,"date":"2022-05-26T16:35:51","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T20:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=146782"},"modified":"2022-08-26T15:13:06","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T19:13:06","slug":"video-devanshi-trivedi-22-neuroscience-philosophy-and-what-makes-us-who-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2022\/05\/26\/video-devanshi-trivedi-22-neuroscience-philosophy-and-what-makes-us-who-we-are\/","title":{"rendered":"Video: Devanshi Trivedi ’22, neuroscience, philosophy, and ‘what makes us who we are’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Devanshi Trivedi \u201922 of Rajkot, India, has wanted to study the brain ever since third grade, when a friend told her that our eyes see the world upside down, but our brains flip everything right side up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trivedi never lost sight of her interest in learning how the brain works. At Bates, she deepened that interest, delving into studies that seek to understand “what makes us who we are,” earning a major in neuroscience and a minor in philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Devanshi
Devanshi Trivedi \u201922 heads into Hathorn Hall to meet with her thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene. (Theophil Syslo\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Trivedi recalls taking her first neuroscience course and thinking, \u201cI have a favorite professor at Bates.\u201d Then she took another neuroscience course \u2014 and discovered another new favorite professor. It happened enough, she laughs, that her friends would say, \u201cNot again!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery professor in neuroscience has just approached the work in so many different ways,” she says. “That\u2019s been one of the best parts of my experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trivedi got to know her senior thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, as a summer research assistant in Greene\u2019s lab after her first year. Being advised by Greene for her thesis is a nice bookend to her Bates career. \u201cHers was the first lab I ever worked in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/lite-youtube>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t
Video by Theophil Syslo\/Bates College<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n

As Trivedi moved from first year to senior year, she went from being a learner of neuroscience knowledge and research methods to a more active collaborator with Greene through her thesis research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI started to have a say in the design elements of my experiments,\u201d she says. “We think together about how we want to analyze the results or what kinds of further work we could do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her neuroscience thesis explores the capacity limits of visual memory, and the curious psychological phenomena of \u201cboundary extension\u201d and \u201cboundary contraction.\u201d The former describes how, after we observe an image and then recall it from memory, we tend to zoom out, recalling details that weren’t actually in the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boundary contraction <\/em>is where our memories crop an image, recalling fewer details as we remember it. It\u2019s a more recently studied phenomenon. \u201cWe believe it is related to the amount of information within an image,\u201d Trivedi says. \u201cOur visual memory may be capacity-limited by the amount of information in images.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Thesis
Devanshi Trivedi ’22 clutches her completed neuroscience thesis and a bouquet of flowers, given to her by a friend, as she joined other happy seniors celebrating the completion of their senior theses on the Historic Quad on April 22, 2022. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates Colleg.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While Trevedi arrived at Bates with a keen interest in studying the science of the brain, only later did she discover an interest in an humanistic approach, through her minor, philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’ve always loved thinking about the mind and the brain and how those two sort of coexist,\u201d she says. \u201cHow does the brain really create a person? That was something that I’ve been able to explore more through the philosophy side of things: How can an organ \u2014 that is just matter \u2014 create something that is conscious or that is human?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether it\u2019s neuroscience and philosophy, or any other juxtaposition of academic interests, the effect is to \u201cbroaden the scope of whatever you thought your field was. And that just gives you so much perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trivedi has wanted to study the brain ever since a childhood friend told her that our eyes see the world upside down, but our brains flip everything right side up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":146785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,217,224],"tags":[11556,193,6982,12256],"class_list":["post-146782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-science-technology","category-society-culture","tag-michelle-greene","tag-neuroscience","tag-philosophy","tag-voices-of-the-class-of-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146782"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146869,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146782\/revisions\/146869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}