Hi Readers,
So I'm on a blogging spree tonight. I think I'm going to try and catch up on as many blogs as I humanly can before I fall asleep midway through a blog.
So this quarter, I'm taking a class on Diagnostic Devices here at Stanford. It involves a lab section where you actually get to use a lot of medical devices to try it out. For example, for the CT scan lab, we placed several objects and took CT scans of it. You get the picture.
This past week, what we did was called EEG, or electroencephalagram (spelling might be wrong). This involves placing electrodes on your head, and recording your brain waves as your are performing different tasks. The tasks that I had to do involve watching a picture as it flashed at a predetermined frequency, grinding my teeth and blinking my eyes while looking at a white screen, and closing my eyes and relaxing.
The last exercise, where I had to close my eyes and relax, is supposed to bring out the "Alpha" waves from your brain. This indicates the 3rd most active level of brain activity (after delta and theta waves), and the waves oscillate at around 10Hz. When I did the exercise, I could hear the lab manager say, "Whoa! Look at those massive Alpha waves! Those are humongous!" I would periodically open my eyes just so that I could see what the Alpha waves look like. He's right - they are gigantic in comparison to the beta waves that were recorded with the flashing image.
He also joked that I must have an Alpha personality, to which I merely shrugged my shoulders and gave him a smile. =)
In fact, my Alpha waves were apparently so strong that the comparative phase drift was small. Normally, natural non-event induced waves tend to phase drift over 360 degrees during a measurement. However, mine was so stable that they were complete confined to a 90 degree quadrant. The lab manager said that this is extremely rare, and that I would make a good function generator. He was joking, but he had a point - when they took the Fourier transform of my brain waves, the signal-to-noise ratio and the spurious-free dynamic range was quite substantial.
Now I wasn't really sure what that meant. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? Neither?
So I did a quick Google search about Alpha waves, and it came up with loads of goodies. Tidbits which I'm not sure that I should trust, but I thought I'd post about anyways. Apparently, having large Alpha waves indicates that you are a very stress-free person, and can come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems. It means that I can go from an alert stage to a relaxed stage very easily. All of these sound like me, and best of all - I'm now proven myself (somewhat) to be relatively stress-free most of the time! I'm wondering if an EEG taken 2-3 years ago would have shown the same thing. I think I'm a lot happier and relaxed now than I was during my undergrad.
Anyways, this post was just a random musing on the Alpha waves that they measured from my brain. I'm glad that my Alpha waves were so large, since it could mean that I am very stress-free. Hopefully I'll stay that way!
Till next post!
-FCDH
So I'm on a blogging spree tonight. I think I'm going to try and catch up on as many blogs as I humanly can before I fall asleep midway through a blog.
So this quarter, I'm taking a class on Diagnostic Devices here at Stanford. It involves a lab section where you actually get to use a lot of medical devices to try it out. For example, for the CT scan lab, we placed several objects and took CT scans of it. You get the picture.
This past week, what we did was called EEG, or electroencephalagram (spelling might be wrong). This involves placing electrodes on your head, and recording your brain waves as your are performing different tasks. The tasks that I had to do involve watching a picture as it flashed at a predetermined frequency, grinding my teeth and blinking my eyes while looking at a white screen, and closing my eyes and relaxing.
The last exercise, where I had to close my eyes and relax, is supposed to bring out the "Alpha" waves from your brain. This indicates the 3rd most active level of brain activity (after delta and theta waves), and the waves oscillate at around 10Hz. When I did the exercise, I could hear the lab manager say, "Whoa! Look at those massive Alpha waves! Those are humongous!" I would periodically open my eyes just so that I could see what the Alpha waves look like. He's right - they are gigantic in comparison to the beta waves that were recorded with the flashing image.
He also joked that I must have an Alpha personality, to which I merely shrugged my shoulders and gave him a smile. =)
In fact, my Alpha waves were apparently so strong that the comparative phase drift was small. Normally, natural non-event induced waves tend to phase drift over 360 degrees during a measurement. However, mine was so stable that they were complete confined to a 90 degree quadrant. The lab manager said that this is extremely rare, and that I would make a good function generator. He was joking, but he had a point - when they took the Fourier transform of my brain waves, the signal-to-noise ratio and the spurious-free dynamic range was quite substantial.
Now I wasn't really sure what that meant. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? Neither?
So I did a quick Google search about Alpha waves, and it came up with loads of goodies. Tidbits which I'm not sure that I should trust, but I thought I'd post about anyways. Apparently, having large Alpha waves indicates that you are a very stress-free person, and can come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems. It means that I can go from an alert stage to a relaxed stage very easily. All of these sound like me, and best of all - I'm now proven myself (somewhat) to be relatively stress-free most of the time! I'm wondering if an EEG taken 2-3 years ago would have shown the same thing. I think I'm a lot happier and relaxed now than I was during my undergrad.
Anyways, this post was just a random musing on the Alpha waves that they measured from my brain. I'm glad that my Alpha waves were so large, since it could mean that I am very stress-free. Hopefully I'll stay that way!
Till next post!
-FCDH
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