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)