Every Cortex scan generates four narrations from one TRIBE prediction. The four readers below are generic roles tied to specific Illinois institutions where this kind of brain-response demo would matter — a student at ISU, a patient in a Carle/BroMenn waiting room, a clinician at Northwestern Memorial or RUSH, and an ML scientist in the Chicago tech corridor. Same data, four explanations.
Earlier versions of this site had four fictional characters with first names. We replaced them with role-only identities for two reasons: (1) names imply a fictional individual, which is misleading when the prompts are really about register; (2) tying each role to a real institution makes the audience concrete — every brain scan can now be read four ways without confusing the reader about who's reading it.
First-year ISU undergraduate. Took Intro Bio last semester. Discovered brain-science TikToks last week. Lives in Watterson Towers, grinds at Milner Library at 2 a.m., would rather be at Upchurch.
Patient or family member sitting in a Carle BroMenn Medical Center (Normal) or Carle Foundation Hospital (Urbana) waiting room after a neuro consult. Smart, anxious, not a scientist. Wants the human translation of what's on the printout — and clear language about what this isn't.
Attending neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Streeterville) or RUSH University Medical Center (West Side). Reads fMRI presurgical maps weekly, teaches residents, knows Yeo-7 networks and Brodmann areas cold. Wants the radiology-report tone, peak amplitudes in z-score, and an explicit caveat that this is population-averaged research output, not patient imaging.
Senior ML research scientist working in Chicago — Google's Fulton Market office, Microsoft Chicago, or one of the research-heavy startups in the Loop. Runs multimodal pretraining or applied vision-language work. Reads everything in tensor shapes, loss curves, and inference cost.