Day 1: The New Girl

Daily, the lab here in the Physical Education Building East opens at 9:00am, and being the eager engineer-hopeful that I am, I arrived here at 7:45am. I enter the lab to see three of the people who have accepted me into their lab group: one who just received his doctorate, one who is aiming for a doctorate, and an undergraduate student. They all treat me with the right amount of authority and respect, just enough to make me feel like a college student yet not so much that they think I'm a college student, which is what I had hoped for. Everyone here only recognizes me as the high school student. Although at one point, a doctorate student came up to me thinking I was a college student and asked if I could be a subject for his experiment, and I agreed, forgetting about the age requirements. Luckily, Dr. Parikh told him not to because I'm under 18.

But what exactly did I do today that was relevant to my research paper? Read. I read all day. Since we weren't conducting any trials today, I was given the task to read this paper on a TMS and fMRI study (right), which I will update you on Friday, which is the day of the weekly Journal Club meetings where we discuss similar articles to improve our understanding of the uses of the TMS. The paper this week is about the effects of hemispherectomy, a surgical procedure used in very few cases of epilepsy where one half of the brain is removed or disabled. The TMS in this study was used to predict the outcome of the hemispherectomy. I will read it a few more times to try to have a better understanding of the study's results.

The most important and exciting part of today is that I was part of a lab group meeting. For the most part, it was for my knowledge. The meeting became interactive and I knew the right answers, but my shyness got the best of me and I refused to speak. During the meeting, I obtained a better understanding of the experiment that will be conducted, and it was a bit more complicated than I thought. Due to the intensity of the application of force, there is a difference in excitability between planning to position the fingers (P) vs. planning to position and apply a force (P+F). This was discovered in the “pre-experiment,” which was conducted in the fall, while I was preparing a proposal for my senior research project. The “pre-experiment” resulted in a lower value of MEP (motor evoked potentials) for P+F.

MEP values below the Baseline show an inhibition in the action, meaning that the brain is keeping the fingers from acting during the planning (being above the Baseline shows excitation, which is not shown in the image). So Baseline resembles a sort-of inactivity in the area of the brain that controls finger movement (M1). There is a greater inhibition with the addition of planning force application due to the intensity of force application.

I have a feeling that I may need to update my proposal because my proposal focuses more on the pre-experiment rather than the CAUSE  of the difference in excitability, which is what the main experiment focuses on. Once I read more articles and receive confirmation on the methodology of the main experiment, I will renovate my proposal accordingly.