Even though Christmas is over, the festive spirit was kept alive in the Translational Brain Health lab. Dan Phillips from Brainbox, previously Rogue Resolutions, paid the team a visit on the 6 of January, and not unlike the wise men of old, he came bearing three stimulating gifts.
The loan of two TMS stimulators, EEG system, EMG and the Brainsight neuronavigation
The laptop promptly arrived a few days later, meaning we could start the assembly of the whole equipment, which worked flawlessly. After a skype call with Brainbox, everything was on track and I managed to send my first externally triggered magnetic stimulus to my arm. There is more code to write and patch together before we can start the experiments, but now we have all the equipment we need.
The last piece of the puzzle is the ethics application. It is a standard procedure to apply for approval of your experiments and only requires that the researchers write precisely what they intend to do in the experiment and why. This takes time, a rare commodity in science that is made even rarer by attending the interesting talks held in the building. Ulysses Neuroscience invited Professor Alessandro Gozzi who explained why studying autism in mice helps explain the variety of symptoms and experiences related to the disorder –
Furthermore, Dr. Rebecca Hirst, winner of the Postdoctoral Research Publication of the Year Award, held a captivating presentation about her paper on the effect of ageing on our capacity to ignore distractions.
Despite all these distractors we are happy to begin preparations for our experiments next week. In the meantime, we wish everyone a significantly awesome weekend.
-Colin @TBHLab.