craziness

scienceThis week was the first exam for the class I am TAing and it was quite intense: grading 90 exams with 6 essay questions each... And then managing to give a talk too! The picture below is actually one from the talk I gave, showing correlations between summed similarity and activity in different oscillatory bands. The summed similarity is the quantity we believe people compute during a task in which they are asked to say whether they have seen the image in the list of images that was shown a few seconds before. The task is quite hard but my subjects can do it, and their brain activity shows interesting oscillatory patterns during that period. The graph on the left shows for every set of my stimuli the probability that subjects will say "yes", it was in the list as a function of this summed similarity they are computing, and on the brain plots on the right you see the correlation of this summed similarity with the oscillatory power at different frequencies, some time after the probe item was shown. Isn't that cool?



ballet Today I went to ballet class which was again a lot of fun because we actually danced some variations. I was also asked to perform in next year's Nutcracker so I hope I'll be able to actually do that and find time to rehearse. Life is so exciting!

dharma
Next week there will be a very interesting conference at Columbia University in New York, where scientists and philosophers will talk about the nature of consciousness, and its studies using neuroscience and Buddhist contemplation. Check out their blog