Head trauma is no laughing matter; and following proper protocol for any instance is critical. Lecture five helped to teach us about the composition of our brains as well as how we can go about measuring brain activity and state. Growing up as a running back for my town’s youth football league quickly introduced me to the concept of a concussion. Over the course of my life I have had a total of three MRIs. An MRI is magnetic resonance imaging similar to an x-ray but can examine soft tissue. My first MRI was when I was nine years old because I suffered from migraines growing up. Don’t get it mistaken, I did not get an fMRI, which is a functional MRI. A functional MRI measures concentrations of oxygen to observe and measure brain activity. Another technique to look inside the brain is an EEG, however this technique detects problems in electrical activity while checking for brain disorders and I have never needed an EEG. My second MRI came at the age of eleven years old at the running back position. I stood up after being whiplashed to the ground and blacked out for about fifteen seconds, I can’t really recall. Repeated hits in contact sports for a prolonged period of time can eventually lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy better known as CTE. My reason for a final MRI was actually quite the scary experience. Senior year of high school I was on maybe my fiftieth sprint in the hardest practice of the year for basketball when during the final sprint I felt a shock of definite and crippling pain in my brain. The second it hit I couldn’t keep running I just stopped. For the next three days I had an ever lasting migraine and I was seriously getting nervous. After four days when I thought I had recovered I returned to practice and I soon as I started jogging that same bolt of pain in my head would strike. Immediately my mom took me in for an MRI. I thought perhaps a different technique would’ve been used at the time because I was uneducated on the matter and quite nervous about my state. Looking back now I remember thinking I might’ve had a small seizure or something perhaps in my Corpus Callosum but clearly the heat of the moment was getting to me. The MRI came back clean and I took a week off from practice. Luckily when I returned, my head was all healed! Its a good thing my athletic career has come to a close and I can lower my guard against head trauma.