Day 26

Wednesday! My day of endless class. Well, I started out going to my Cognitive Neuroscience class... we went over higher level functions of the visual system. One of my favorite topics! It was good, and I got my article for the seminar that myself and two others are going to be presenting on next Wednesday. "Right Parietal Cortex Plays a Critical Role in Change Blindness" ... It is extremely interesting. It was all about using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (picture) to disrupt neuron activity in the parietal lobe of some patients to determine if the parietal lobe does indeed play a role in change blindness. The findings were great and now we are on the brink to discovering just what specific brain structures are of importance for our conscious awareness. As we have found in numerous different situations, our brain acts even if we are not conscious of it acting. . . some philosophize so far to wondering if we actually need to be conscious to do anything. One of the greatest examples I think is through blindsight, this occurs when patients are legally blind, they can't "see" anything, yet this is due to a problem in the visual cortex of the brain, as oppose to the eye itself. In our brain we have two basic visual pathways, a "where" dorsal pathway - essentially responsible for where things are in space, and a "what" ventral pathway - essentially responsible for determining what these things are... they both run through the primary visual cortex, V1, (which is damaged in these patients)... yet there is a third, older and primitive pathway that is utilized by most reptiles and lower level animals. This pathway bypasses the visual cortex and responds directly to motion. Creating this phenomenon of blindsight, these people are able to identify the direction of moving objects, even though reporting to never have consciously "seen" them. A perfect example would be that of a frog, a fly could be literally sitting directly in front of it, but it wouldn't attempt to get it, because it can't see it... but once that fly takes off, the motion is registered and the frog will get the fly! Pretty interesting stuff.

Anyway, after that I set off to get a ticket to go to the highlands with a club called SENIC, don't remember what that really stands for... but that is besides the point. Unfortunately they were sold out, so I killed some time by printing out all my itineraries for spring break, it is exciting to have them in my hand! After that I met and chatted with the international advisor here, she wanted to talk to me about my stipend, which apparently they forgot to hand into the financial office a week or so ago... got all that squared away and should be getting it within the week :)

My next class was a "practorial" in a lab that I was told "was just around the corner" of my normal Merchinson campus. I went to go find it, walked a few blocks... could not find it... so I decided I should talk to the receptionist @ Merchinson before I wandered around all day trying to find this place, she told me it was just down the street. I specifically asked "is it far?" , and she specifically said "no it is just down the street, this is 10 Colinton road, it is 42 Colinton road"... Sounded good to me. Off I went. Now even before I reach the next cross street the address on the other side are piling up faster then I can count, 43...45...47...49515355575961...

but where is my mystery 42?! I walked up and down that street for a good 10 minutes until I took a turn determined to find this lab... I ran into what looked like two professors, so I asked them where this was. They said keep going down the street, pass the school on the left, pass the stop lights, it is on the right. This place was at least a MILE away. I don't know how they number their streets here, but it sucks. So I finally find my class, stumble in a good half an hour late... and they are collecting data for an experiment. Luckily I only missed the instructions. It was a reaction time assessment where you had to determine if the word on the screen was actually a word or a "nonword" ... two words were presented one after another, it could have been either or. Press "z" for nonwords, "/" for words. It records your times for 5 conditions; associated words, unassociated words, word-nonwords, nonword-words, and nonword-nonwords. I will proudly boast that I had the fastest reaction times in the last two years of this experiment with a 98% accuracy rate... gotta love science ;). Anyway. We grabbed the data from our class and last years class, analyzed it, and people were significantly faster with associated words. Good stuff.

When I got back Jordan and Marc wanted to start the night early. I ate dinner and skyped for a while then out of no where, the fire alarm goes off. So everyone outside. It's snowing. It's the age old battle fire vs ...snow? No no, there was no fire... false alarm, yet the fire truck still had to come, and we had to wait forever for them to check every room. In that downtime somehow beer pong got brought up, we got the supplies and started when we got back in the rooms. It was now us, Malcom and Amy. Shortly after, Amy, Taryn, Paige, and Sogol came. Shortly after, we were off to Biddy Mulligans for some good times and live music. Shannon, Rebecca, Nick, Adrian, Katrina, Macelo, and Greg met up with us at the pub. I think we took over that place, 16 people, not bad. It was a great time, we went to Pedro's on the way back, he was very pleased at the business we brought him. After that everyone started going back in, the rest winded down @ Jordan and Marcs... another successful day i'd say!