The Gab Lab: Week 4

Hi, this is Michelle. I've just finished my fourth week at the Gabrieli Lab, a brain and cognitive sciences lab at MIT. If I had to describe this week in one word, it would be busy. Throughout the week, I continued my usual administrative duties whenever I had time to spare. These tasks ranged from more scoring, organizing, and entering data, to creating an official MIT certificate of completion for the subjects who had taken part in the CASL study.  I also scored these subjects' final exams, known as the HSK test. The HSK is China's standardized test of Chinese language proficiency for foreigners, and amazingly, nearly everyone passed after just 2 weeks of training! 

In addition to running a Session 1 on Monday, I also touched base with Amy, who decided that it was time for me to edit brains. As a result, I met up with Nayeon, one of the lab's many undergrads here through UROP (MIT's undergraduate research opportunities program). Nayeon showed me how to edit brains using Mindhive (MIT's portal for brain research) and FreeSurfer, a program created specifically for the reconstruction of the brain's cortical surface from structural and functional MRI data. Editing brains is a 5 step process that takes around 3 days to be completed. I spent the day going through the first three steps: skullsplitting (the thinning out of the skull to create an image of good quality), control point edits (the adding of white matter that the program did not initially include), and white matter edits (the editing of white matter volume to erase gray matter that is inside the surface boundary). While this was an informative and enjoyable experience, what I found surprising was how much computer skills were required. Not only did I have to use Terminal, which is code that commands a Mac, but FreeSurfer and MindHive were also heavily based on computer coding. I forgot to take pictures of the process, but I'll be sure to upload some next week because they are really cool.

This week I also had a lot of meetings. On Tuesday, Amy organized a statistics club for the LAP & CASL members. As this was the first session, we started off relatively 'simple' (for them!) by looking at the general linear regression model. Having little stats experience, I was nervous because I had not understood the paper we had to read. However, I found that Amy and Caitlin's (undergrad) step by step explanations were incredibly helpful, and by the end of the meeting, I understood everything and was active in discussion. This week we went over the basic regression model, matrices, and rank deficiency, and next week we will be continuing this. Then, the other interns and I gathered for a lunch meeting with Satra Ghosh, a research scientist who focuses on 'finding novel computational approaches for representing data in the context of clinical disorders, and developing models for diagnosing and predicting treatment outcome'. During these lunches, which were organized by post doc Joanna, we get the chance to ask these scientists anything we want. We talked to Satra about his bee farm, his dream to build a super robot, and his profession, which he refers to as a 'social engineer', because of the opportunity to interact with a very diverse group of people. Today we met with Dr. Maiya Geddes, who spends half of her time in the lab as a post doc researching cognitive reserve in aging, and the other half in the hospital as a clinical neurologist, where she meets patients ranging from having dementia or schizophrenia, to patients who are slowly losing their memory or ability to speak. This talk was fascinating, but the best part was when she offered to let us 'shadow' her in the hospital on Wednesdays, which we are hoping to do next week! 

On Wednesday and Thursday, I ran several Session 1's again, but was not able to administer the KBIT, as Kelly, who was going to approve me for testing, unfortunately was out sick this week. Following Amy's instructions, I also taught Lilla and Louisa (interns) how to use the LAP database to score production recordings. When we all met up with Amy today, we had many questions concerning patterns and individual language components (verbs, subjects, articles, conjugations), which sounds boring, but is actually extremely fascinating. As a result, Amy decided that I should further modify the database to include all these patterns that we have been noticing. Then, we discussed a cognitive neuroscience article about the different methods to study the brain (EEG, fMRI, PET, MEG), which was also highly informative and interesting. 

Next week, I will continue running Session 1's and helping out with fMRI's. I will also meet up with Kelly to discuss the psychological background and use of the tests I am scoring, have another lunch meeting with a lab member, and observe an EEG that Amy scheduled me for. Needless to say, I am super excited for my last week here at the Gab Lab!