Last week in San Francisco

On my last day I got to give the lab a presentation on my project during our weekly lab meeting. These lab meetings are interesting. There are a lot of interruptions (not the bad kind) during almost every presentation challenging or supporting what the speaker is saying. I'm not sure if this is unique to this lab or if that's just how science meetings go, but either way it was a lot of fun and I felt like we were able to come up with good conclusions on music cognition and it's comparison to speech.

If you look at the data figures below, the first one shows that important regions for counting and music overlap a lot on the motor cortex, and a little bit over Broca's area. Counting is the only test that didn't have any visual or auditory stimuli like the picture naming or auditory naming tasks did. This makes counting one of the best to compare to music since music also has no external stimuli. Looking at the first image where the darker the red the higher percentage of error there was (ie mistakes/total stimulations), it's clear that the important area of counting is similar to playing piano.
Meanwhile, the second image emphasizes how slowing happened frequently when the motor cortex was stimulated, but arrest would happen when places even in the auditory cortex was stimulated. There are a lot of places to go with this data, and hopefully the lab and I will be able to communicate well enough to publish a paper sometime soon!
Dylan

Speech Data!!!!!!

We finally got the speech data for all of the tests done!!! The analysis of it hasn't started quite yet, but from a quick glimpse it looks like there are definitely spots from speech that overlap with music. Unfortunately not all of the same spots were stimulated for each speech or music test, in part because this experiment originally just had medical intent. Either way, it has a lot of promise. I'll keep you updated when we come to a conclusion about what these images mean. But for now I'll let you all come to your own conclusions and look at the pictures below. The darker the color of the line means that it lead to more mistakes when stimulated. (the task order from top to bottom is: auditory naming, counting, piano, picture naming, and repetition)

Chipping Away

The past week or so I've been chipping away at finishing the annotations on the speech videos. There were a couple things that slowed the process down. One of the main delayers was it took quite a while to get files of when the electrodes shocked my brain. I had to watch a lot of videos to try and find the ones that we were looking for. While tedious it was kind of cool to look back on all of the tests that they ran on me that I hadn't seen in a while. I think the best videos are from when I was watching South Park. Even though I was struggling in the hospital, I still laughed at all of the fart jokes. Anyways, after I found the correct files with the videos we had to run the brain wave files through several file type transitions so that they could be seen and analyzed on Praat. Thankfully all of this is pretty much done so I'll be able to finish the annotations pretty quickly. Once the annotated ELAN files are finished, we can plug the data into a MatLab function and get some good brain images to show the data.

Life outside of the lab has been awesome! This past weekend I drove myself up to Squaw Valley for two hard skiing days. It's been a crazy year in snowfall in California, Squaw's snow base was over 200 inches. Thankfully, I got to stay at a family friend's house for free.

Dylan

Further Along with Project

This past week I looked at where in my brain was shocked when I made mistakes and what type of mistakes I made. For the most part, deletion, slowing down, arrests, and addition all originated from part of the motor cortex. Interestingly, substitution came more from Broca's area than the motor cortex. This makes sense because Broca's is relatively important for hand movement. It's interesting that Broca's area is involved though because it is also one key part of the brain for speech. I talked about all of this in a meeting with my advisor, Matt, where we spread annotated pictures of my brain across a table (see picture below) and tried to summarize where was particularly important. In the end we decided that it would be interesting and get closer to writing a paper if we compare the speech tests that were done on me to the piano tests. My next step will be to make another ELAN file of annotations on speech errors that occurred when my brain was shocked in tests similar to the piano tests.

What happened outside of the lab? I had a piano lesson at Stanford with my dad's old piano teacher and got to shake hands with Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State! It was pretty cool to hear a politician playing piano.

Dylan

First Day in San Francisco

Hello Readers!
My dad and I pulled into San Jose last night and got settled into my Great Aunt's house. I commuted over to UCSF today for a quick meeting with my advisor, Matt. Plans for research are pretty much still the same: focus on finishing piano cognition project. In the next couple days I'm just going to finish reading the Python book just to get the main concepts of programming. Once I'm finished, the first step will be to analyze what type of mistake I made when I was shocked: Substitution, Addition, Deletion or Slowing Down. Substitution is when I completely missed the right note. Addition is when I smushed two notes together, one of which is wrong. Deletion is when I just skipped over a note, or "deleted" it. And Slowing Down is when I delayed. The two most frequent mistakes were Substitution and Slowing Down. After  annotation, the next step will be to look at where in the brain was shocked when I made the mistakes and see if any type of mistake was made when a specific part was shocked. I'll print out several pictures of my brain and just circle where was shocked for each different type of mistake. Hopefully, there are specific parts that lead to certain mistakes. Either way the data will be interesting!
Till next time,
Dylan

Hello Readers!

This past week has been uneventful. Essentially all I've done for my SRP  is rereading a book on how to use basic Python programming. The book is a little tedious at the beginning, the main things it teaches you how to do is to make functions which isn't particularly challenging but it is really important. Example of how to define functions on Python:

>>> def convert_to_celcius(Fahrenheit):
        Return (Fahrenheit-32)*5/9

Writing these is pretty straightforward. The main importance of knowing how to define an equation is so you can program a loop that lets you plug a lot of data into a function and have all of the data go through the algorithm in one input. There are two types of loops: a for loop and a while loop. For loops are loops that plug and chug the data. While loops repeat statement(s) while the given condition is true.

This next week I'll take a small step away from programming and focus on interpreting the data from ELAN files (annotated video of me playing piano and being stimulated to make mistakes). Hopefully I can write a short summary of the data that we've collected so we can figure out what the paper we're writing should look like.

Cheers,
Dylan

Introduction to Neuroscience Research

This third trimester I will be in San Francisco working on my Senior Research Project (SRP). While I was at UCSF's children hospital, with an electrode grid on my left temporal and parietal lobe, multiple music and language tests were performed to ensure removing the impaired tissue didn't limit me playing piano or speaking English, Spanish, and French.

For my SRP, I will be helping finish the research on the experiment that searched for piano cognition. The experiment for this had me playing relatively simple pieces that I knew well. At random points during me playing the doctors would shock certain parts of my brain to see if the shock would make me make a mistake.

We started this research in the Summer of 2015. My work on this experiment was labelling what type of mistake was made and then looking at where in my brain was shocked at the time. We'll continue this research for my SRP and hopefully have a paper written, maybe published by the time my project is done.

If time allows, I think it would be cool to compare foreign languages to music. There were several tests done on me that were just listening to music or phrases in English, French, and Spanish. I think it would be interesting to compare the two. Whether or not the music and languages overlap much would be interesting. I think it would be particularly cool if foreign languages overlapped with music in our brains.

Excited to get out there and start researching in two weeks!

Dylan