This past week I began my data exporting from the NIDA database CDW (which I frankly have no definition of) which is a compilation of clinical subjects that have been a part of past protocols. While many of the interns I'm working with are dealing with one or two protocol groups at a time, I'm dealing with all of the neuroimaging branch data. To compile this data, I learned VLOOKUP, an excel function, which isn't a huge feat but sometimes I think a computer is broken when really the monitor is just off. I would also like to thank Dr. Cags for boosting my excel confidence during all of calculus this year. So I get excited, VLOOKUP all my data points, delete the missing data/persons for which they belong, and feel like an absolute #boss. I was mildly concerned by the fact that I had pared 1,000+ persons to a concise 64, but generally overlooked it and straight away emailed my PI ready to export some more.
Well, needless to say, 64 was not the right number.
Parsing through some messy data collection, my final compilation ended up being 1120 participants (now I am a #boss) and everyone was very proud of my feats (and by everyone, I mean the two interns that work with me and have computer science backgrounds, and another doctor I have been working with who had also received my overexcited 64 participant data set).
This week ended up being particularly long, and by our Friday lab meeting, everyone was too tired to even ask questions in our lab updates (this is rare). That being said, I did manage to absorb a quantity of Friday's chat. Journal club this week was relatively breezy for me, considering the journal very closely resembled what I'll be doing/the primary literature I went through. On the lab updates side of things, there were two updates this week, one involving optogenetic stimulation of cortico-striatal regions in regards to methamphetamine self administration. To understand the basics of the experiment, it's important to understand the self-administration paradigm (there are many paradigms here and I think I know ~3). Here, a rodent has a lever and when he pushes said lever he is injected via catheter with whatever substance is being evaluated. In this case, they had a rat and a meth lever. They trained these rats within the self-administration paradigm and they then introduced the foot-shock paradigm (see!). So now, whenever the rats pressed the lever, yeah they'd get meth (which is a thumbs up for a meth-addict rat), but they'd also get their foot zapped. The researchers saw that some of the rats had different levels of tolerance to this, for some, they got zapped a few times and they just quit pushing the lever. Other rats, however, ignored the foot shocking and went on getting their meth injections like nobody's business. This was all representative of the variance in tendency for rats to become actual addicts to substances, which is relatively translatable to human models.
The other lab update was regarding childhood dependency relationships and how they then impact adult relationships. Basically, if you've got separation anxiety as a kid, you'll have a mirrored sense of dependence as an adult. All of this is resulting from increased resting functional connectivity of the amygdala and certain DMN nodes.
So that's it for the lab week!
Otherwise, it was my aunt's boyfriend's birthday on Monday. So, my cousin and I were invited to hibachi, and who doesn't love hibachi?? Well, turns out we were at a hibachi buffet which is really just false advertising for a Chinese buffet. That being said the lo mein was good, so I wasn't that mad.
Friday I headed back home, and shut in by the rain went out to get ramen (my very. first. ramen.) I had some very mixed feelings about my very wet noodles, but in retrospect I did like it, though I do have a question for all you ramen connoisseurs: am I supposed to finish this? Like really this is the biggest bowl of food I have ever been presented.
Well, needless to say, 64 was not the right number.
Parsing through some messy data collection, my final compilation ended up being 1120 participants (now I am a #boss) and everyone was very proud of my feats (and by everyone, I mean the two interns that work with me and have computer science backgrounds, and another doctor I have been working with who had also received my overexcited 64 participant data set).
This week ended up being particularly long, and by our Friday lab meeting, everyone was too tired to even ask questions in our lab updates (this is rare). That being said, I did manage to absorb a quantity of Friday's chat. Journal club this week was relatively breezy for me, considering the journal very closely resembled what I'll be doing/the primary literature I went through. On the lab updates side of things, there were two updates this week, one involving optogenetic stimulation of cortico-striatal regions in regards to methamphetamine self administration. To understand the basics of the experiment, it's important to understand the self-administration paradigm (there are many paradigms here and I think I know ~3). Here, a rodent has a lever and when he pushes said lever he is injected via catheter with whatever substance is being evaluated. In this case, they had a rat and a meth lever. They trained these rats within the self-administration paradigm and they then introduced the foot-shock paradigm (see!). So now, whenever the rats pressed the lever, yeah they'd get meth (which is a thumbs up for a meth-addict rat), but they'd also get their foot zapped. The researchers saw that some of the rats had different levels of tolerance to this, for some, they got zapped a few times and they just quit pushing the lever. Other rats, however, ignored the foot shocking and went on getting their meth injections like nobody's business. This was all representative of the variance in tendency for rats to become actual addicts to substances, which is relatively translatable to human models.
The other lab update was regarding childhood dependency relationships and how they then impact adult relationships. Basically, if you've got separation anxiety as a kid, you'll have a mirrored sense of dependence as an adult. All of this is resulting from increased resting functional connectivity of the amygdala and certain DMN nodes.
So that's it for the lab week!
Otherwise, it was my aunt's boyfriend's birthday on Monday. So, my cousin and I were invited to hibachi, and who doesn't love hibachi?? Well, turns out we were at a hibachi buffet which is really just false advertising for a Chinese buffet. That being said the lo mein was good, so I wasn't that mad.
Friday I headed back home, and shut in by the rain went out to get ramen (my very. first. ramen.) I had some very mixed feelings about my very wet noodles, but in retrospect I did like it, though I do have a question for all you ramen connoisseurs: am I supposed to finish this? Like really this is the biggest bowl of food I have ever been presented.
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