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