Here’s something really scary to do: randomly email people and ask things of them. Even more scary? Randomly find people on LinkedIn and ask if they will meet with you, a total stranger. Now why am I stalking people you ask? One of my professors at school recommend that we meet with people in industry over the summer and just ask them about their lives (after all people love talking about themselves 🙂 ).
Was the project a success you ask? After messaging multiple people on LinkedIn who were working as an engineer or researcher in the biomedical industry here in Minneapolis and were conveniently Notre Dame alumni, I had three people get back to me to either meet for coffee or talk on the phone. I would call that a success!
Well this first week in the lab went as one could expect. I got introduced to the rhythms of lab and went through the patterns of short term memory loss expected with learning a lot of information in a very short time. I learned what my project was going to be and started designing the stimuli that would be used for the test. Expect a post soon where I talk more about what I am doing and why. Short story short I am working to see which regions of the brain are activated by pitch.
A frequency spectra showing what each of the stimuli look like. The top row are low-frequency (like a snare) sounds and the bottom row are high-frequency sounds (like a flute).
Week 3: Week of June 17
This week was exciting because I started building my behavioral test for the experiment! If only I had remembered that it would take longer than my simple brain thought. 😉 This week also brought a lot of paper reading that I had put off the first week. I think I read 4 or 5 papers over the course of 2 days plus parts of a few different textbooks. My brain was definitely on information overload.
With one of my postdocs gone, I also found a few other things to keep me occupied. I had to give a presentation to my seminar group explaining what I was doing and how I was planning on doing it. I had a week to prepare this presentation and thankfully I had started building it at 3 in the morning on the day it was assigned, so I actually had it done during Week 2 to show to my PI and postdocs for critique. My postdocs said it was really good and I also got really good feedback from my seminar coordinate on it. Glad that design class I took finally came in handy!
I also had the privilege to take part in a friend’s vision study. They were testing to see if this crazy version of a visual phenomena worked the same as the original version. I got told that my data looked really good, which made the motion sickness worth it! Definitely a good experience before running my own subjects.
Week 4: Week of June 24
More paper reading and coding…. the days of academia as a research assistant. Four papers in one day, this must be a new record. I am finally at that magical point where a paper is referencing another paper and I can say “Ha! I’ve already read that one and understand what is happening!”; it’s a pretty great feeling. After meeting with my team, I moved on to version 2 of the code. This resulted in me finding out I am a very fast coder… and the only RA they have had that can really code. So I spent Thursday playing around with pictures of my brain and looking how to make it look cool in a bunch of different ways. Man I love when people make good documentation! Other exciting thing that happened: I got the go ahead to run subjects the next week!
Here’s what my brain looks like in case anyone was wondering.
Week 5: Week of July 1
Yay for holiday weeks! Can I manage to get all five of my subjects run before the 4th? Monday consisted of setting up the test and making sure everything will work correctly and all the information is correctly saved. Everything runs smoothly by the end of the day! Tuesday: time to meet with the team. I’m very excited to tell them I have all my subjects lined up for the next day ( 5 subjects in 8 hours!!) and see if we’re gonna start calibrating and if my dreams go right, run subjects at the scanner! The meeting results in the subjects being delayed a week and version 3 of the code being built with a new task for the subject. Instead of the original oddball detection the test now uses a one-back methodology. It’s harder to hear and we don’t have to throw out any data. Back to the computer and back to the code. I spent 9 hours on MATLAB that day… but the test was all done and ready to go by the end of the day. Wednesday resulted in me making the code fancier to do some different calculations and then writing up a 6-page document on how the code works and what exactly the test does. Maybe it’ll come into use at some point (like a paper). Then it was time for a great holiday weekend with family! (More to come on all my social happenings at some other point)
Me getting ready to go into the MRI scanners. No metal allowed!
I started out my summer research internship this week in the Auditory Neuroscience and Perception Lab. Today was my first day in lab due to being in a Neuroscience “boot camp” all week. So far my adventures in Minnesota have brought all sorts of new and exciting experiences. On Friday, I paddle-boarded to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. On Saturday, we hiked there as a group and I walked across the Mississippi River no less than four times. Saturday night we had a talent show and I performed for King and Country’s cover of “The Greatest Show” in American Sign Language. The crowd went wild and many people came up afterwards and told me they hadn’t ever seen anything like it. Since Saturday, people have come up and asked me about sign language and even a few have signed to me 🙂 .
Monday brought the start of our “boot camp”, during which we were to learn how neuroimaging works in a nutshell. This was to allow us to complete our summer projects. Monday we started off scanning a bag of clementines, but within three days we had scanned all five of us students as well as a pineapple. The pineapple became an excellent pineapple upside down cake. Is it ethical to eat your patients? Today I got to see the world’s biggest MRI with a strength of 10.5T! To get it into the building they had to take out the walls and use two semis to move it.
Motion analysis of the water content in a pineapple.
The summer promises to be a promising one and I am very excited to launch into my project(s) in the coming days. Next week alone I will be helping run a few scans and hopefully starting to get into some data analysis and experimental design. I’m not sure what adventures the weekend will bring, but I can imagine there will be some paper reading, YouTube video watching, and some Transit as we explore the city.
Researching with One Ear Closed 