sciatrix

....today, the learning experience is that coordinating the shipping of twenty-odd singing mice from New York to Texas is a mind-bogglingly complex endeavor, and I am just barely coming out on top of the bureaucracy. But! But! There will be mice I can use for this experiment, ideally by my committee meeting and at least so that I can do a kickass talk for Evolution this year. I'm applying for the SSE Grad Council this year, although the deadline is today--gotta make sure I set some time aside today to do that in amid the flurry of emails.

Also, I'm very carefully dipping my toes into The Body Keeps the Score and gritting my teeth the entire way--more because conceptualizing my life as traumatic in any way feels bad and wrong and self-indulgent and terrifying than because I think that the book itself is problematic. (I'm listening to the text-to-speak function on my phone, which is comforting and a little less scary than reading it for reasons I have no idea how to articulate.)

I'm low on Diamine Meadow right now (review) in my TWSBI stub pen, and I'm really sad about it. I think I need to commit and buy myself a proper bottle of it--this is just the tail end of the 2mL sample I got for my birthday last year.

A fMRI is not a “real-time brain scan.” It’s an attempt to understand neuronal activity by measuring small changes in blood flow within the brain and hoping these closely follow increased brain activity, usually in the form of action potentials. It is at best a proxy of brain activity, not a direct measure, which is primarily popular because it is minimally invasive.

Folks who represent fMRIs as magic indications of precise brain activity over time is a large part of why I hate dealing with them. STOPPIT.

No love,

sci