Tuesday (June 29)

Tuesday:

Today we had our first fMRI fundamentals talk. Dr. Hirsch taught it, and it was really interesting. We learned about some brain theories and how the fMRI works. I am going to try and explain the whole lecture in another post.

After the talk, about half of the summer students and I went back to the area where I normally sit. (there are two areas in the lab, the main area and the back area. I sit in the main area because that's where Spiro is, but there is more room in the back so a lot of summer students work there.) I started working more on choosing my stimuli, which, at a certain point, became a group activity. After a while, we all went back to doing our own things. By the end of the day, I narrowed my stimuli down to about 80 pieces and started to shorten them to 10-15 second long clips.
Choosing the stimuli was tough. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I cannot assign emotions to the pieces that I use: they must be chosen by a population similar to my subjects. However, in choosing the pieces to put into the pre-study, I have to choose pieces with relatively obvious and clear emotions. Out of the 110 pieces I started with, I felt that all of them had an easily defined emotion. I did my first filter through by deciding that each piece needed to have at contain at least one minute defined by a single emotion. This got rid of easily 20 songs.