No holiday, yet sweet, summer

 It is given by the fact that most people work in labs, which operate also during hot Californian summer,  but also  by the fact that Caltech is home to number of so called SURF students.  SURF program offers a taster of work in a research lab.  It is certainly very interesting opportunity how to spend summer and get a feel of how work in research looks like. I was originally considering to take part in the program too, but I came to conclusion (and I am happy for that) that 10 weeks isn't enough to really understand and be able to fully operate in research environment.

My work here at Caltech is getting more and more advanced. At the moment I am working on two major research projects where I am included in the data analysis. If everything goes well I could be a second or third author on some of the papers, which for a bachelor student is a ticket into decent grad school.

One of the projects which interests me especially looks at brain mechanism of time perception. To look at this we collect data using EEG (136 electrodes placed on the scalp) and so called oddball paradigm (subject is watching sequentially presented stimuli, always 3-5 shapes in the sequence are the same, but at unknown point in the line a different shape appears). Years ago, researchers observed that people perceive the oddball shape to last longer than the standard shapes. From everyday, imagine a hand of watch, which our eye sometimes perceives as if it stayed a bit longer at certain location). We use EEG data analysis to decide between or rule out two major existing theories of this subjective time expansion. At the moment we have rather puzzling results ruling out both of the major hypotheses, but before we make any claims we need to conduct further and more thorough analysis.  In the end, the new knowledge may actually help us understand better how consciousness works as it is closely related to time perception.

A major life feature apart from work duties is the fact that summer has arrived to California. Temperatures linger between 30 and 35 degrees C, which seemed unimaginable to me before I arrived, but now I am getting used to it. The key is to walk very slowly and always on the shadow side of the street.

Greetings from Los Angeles