The Backyard Brains 2018 Summer Research Fellowship is coming to a close, but not before we get some real-world scientific experience in! Our research fellows are nearing the end of their residency at the Backyard Brains lab, and they are about to begin their tenure as neuroscience advocates and Backyard Brains ambassadors. The fellows dropped in […]

Be it fate, choice, or a downstream effect of our universe’s tendency to gradually decay into chaos, I ended up doing what I love this summer, and surrounded by some of the most interesting people I’ve met. One could not ask for more. But this begs the question, “Would I have made it into such […]

One of the most attractive things about a BYB Summer Fellowship is the chance to spend a summer in colorful Ann Arbor. We changed the program name from an internship to a fellowship because of the lasting connections made throughout the summer, and these connections are made possible by the things we all do together! […]

Is It Actually My Choice To Not Title This Post? Looking doubtful.   Since last I wrote about the “Free Will” project, I have increased the volume of data I have to work with and I have organized it into an intuitive MATLAB database for efficient manipulation via a set of functions for monte carlo analysis, spectrogram generation, […]

Fresh, organic, locally sourced meditation researchLast Friday, Backyard Brains once again opened our doors (even wider–they’re always open during business hours!) to our fellow and aspiring citizen scientists as a part of this year’s Ann Arbor Tech Trek!  Dozens of local tech companies had their doors open to the public that evening and we, like […]

“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.” -Sam Harris   The previous quote originated in a book called Free Will by Sam Harris. I take it to loosely mean that we do not exert conscious control over our thoughts and actions (free will), though we do not live out […]

From left: Ben, Anusha, Yifan, Jessica, Aaron, Jess, Greg Gage (not a Fellow), Maria, Dan, Anastasiya, Molly, Ilya Meet the Fellows, See the Projects The fellows are off to a great start! This week has been focused on them getting their feet wet with our kits and learning about what we do here at Backyard Brains. Be […]

By Patrick Glover DETAILS A longstanding debate in philosophy focuses on the existence of free will. Do humans have some inherent moral agency, or are our brains just biological machines, subject to the same physical determinism as any other animal? Modern neuroscience can provide some insight to these questions, such as Benjamin Libet’s famous 1986 experiments that […]

Libet had the subjects view an oscilloscope with a dot rotating periodically in a circle, and subjects were asked to retroactively report where the dot was when they first became aware that they were about to perform the voluntary task. He could then calculate the average latency between when the subject reported awareness and when […]

It took a lot of tinkering, but I’ve finally performed the free will experiment using multiple electrodes on the scalp. The hardware setup was fairly simple. Take two more Heart/Brain shields, switch C7 for a 47µF cap on both, and stack them on top of the existing setup using headers. Make sure each shield has a […]

Now that I’ve got the ear clip unipolar EEG set up, I’m finally ready to record. I have my subject wear two headbands: one around the head like a normal sweatband and one under the chin and over C3 like in my previous experiments. I had to do a quick test to get the polarity […]

I had been searching for a readiness potential for weeks, trying to sift through noise two orders of magnitude louder than the signal itself, with little success. This morning Greg, my research mentor, pointed out that since I’m using a bipolar electrode EEG, the op-amp is only magnifying the difference between the two leads over […]