by Benjamin Geoffrey Stewart
There’s a remarkable shift that occurs every time I hit the one month point of living somewhere new. Unfortunately, for Granada the one month mark is also the halfway point, and the awful countdown has begun. Now I have to start thinking about gifts for friends and family, final postcards, seeing places I’ve not had the chance to yet, and wrapping up the tail end of my experiment. As of today I will have completed 21 behavioral sessions and 24 eyetracks, and I’m really looking forward to hitting the thirty mark with my eyetracks so I actually have some data to process. (ADVISORS: STOP READING NOW) And it’s actually possible that I’ll have one or two days off at the end of my time here! (ADVISORS: YOU CAN CONTINUE READING NOW). I’ve actually gotten the opportunity to help out with some experiments here in the lab – I’m getting capped later this afternoon for one experiment, and got tested in a reading SPAN task yesterday. I’m very proud to call eyetracking my “thing,” for lack of a better word, (today’s an 11-hour lab day, please accept my sincerest apologies for the dive in my lexical variety) but it’s fascinating to watch the ERPers in action, as well as all the different cognitive control and behavioral tasks going on in the lab. It’s almost as if I’m slowly piecing bits of how my brain works together every time I participate in something. With Eleanora’s experiment I can see how hard my brain works (and how spectacularly it fails) when I have to inhibit languages. With Ana’s I gauged my working memory, with favorable results. With my own experiment I could look at how my late bilingual brain processes codeswitching, and there’s obviously scores of other behaviorals that could help me piece together the lump of grey matter behind my eyes. I was actually very, very heavily invested into math and science as a high schooler, and I find myself wanting to pull back to this. There’s something enormously satisfying about knowing the “why” behind something, even if it’s something as small as a subordinating conjunction or spark of electricity, and it’s that desire that pulls me through so much of my academic life. The point of this entire post? Maybe I need to start digging into some neuro when I get home.