Last BASIS Assignment

This final blog post is my last BASIS assignment. After 8 years, hours of classes, homework, stress, tears, and yes, good times too, I am finally done. I’m finished with high school for good, and now just have to wait a month to graduate. I can’t believe that I’m actually finished with everything! 

I had my final AP Research presentation on Monday of this week, and it went well. I put in my AP number and am officially finished with that class (once I finish writing this blog post). 

It’s hard to believe that this is my 10th and final blog post. Thank you so much to everyone (anyone?) who read this. To anyone in the future who comes across this blog: if you are a future employer of mine and this came up when you searched my name, disclaimer: this is 17 year old me and I wrote this in high school. And yes, I know that most of this blog is really embarrassing; please don’t scroll down. If you do, I must say that I have warned you. 

Anyway, this whole process has been such a great experience, and I am so thankful for my research consultant Bob Wilson. He gave me an outstanding opportunity that has opened my eyes to so many things (specifically, to something my eyes do on their own anyway) and I will forever be grateful. I also love that my senior year ended in February, and I have to thank my school for that one. These past few months have been so relaxing, and I look forward to this next month before graduation. 

Attending BASIS has been a long journey. When I first started in fifth grade, I cried every night for the first week because I wanted to leave. I’ve come a long way, because in 12th grade I only cried one night a week instead (just kidding). I’ve been through so much of my life with my classmates here, and traveled from California to Peru to Italy with them. I have a sister in 7th grade, and when she graduates I’ll have already been out of college for a year. I hope to go on to someday get a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. 

This is all a bittersweet time, but I can say that I am truly thankful for the experiences I’ve had at BASIS. I’ll miss some of my teachers a lot, because they have been so nice to me and have taught me so much. Each year has brought me a new perspective, and I’m glad to be leaving high school with so much knowledge, ready to experience college in the fullest way possible. I’ve made friends here that I know I will remain friends with throughout my life. And, all of my experiences and the people at BASIS will always have a special place in my heart. 

Goodbye blogspot!

Presentation

I started off my presentation with an intro that went something like this:

An idea fundamental to the history of the human experience is the idea of free will. Greek philosophers like Heraclitus who argued that there were laws that the universe followed, and others like Leucippus argued for determinism, the thought that everything is already determined and we have no control over our actions. Religions were created to try to explain the phenomena around us, and quell our most basic impulses. 

Since the time of ancient Greece and the beginning of major religions, modern thinkers have propositioned that maybe we do in fact have free will. We know we each have our own minds and make our own decisions. In fact, even our society is based around the idea that we are all free thinkers, like our Founding Fathers. 

Recently, however, science has brought us back to this fundamental question. It has pointed us in a new direction, which is to say, yes, we know we each have our own thoughts and feelings and ideas and expressions, but are we really in control? Science isn’t pointing us in the direction of God or an external determining factor, but rather an internal one. Our brains determine everything for us, and even what may seem like the slightest imperceptible change could in fact determine a large part of who you are. 

And who is that, exactly? Everything we do is guided by neural networks. Sleeping, eating, breathing, thinking - you name it. Your unconscious brain performs activities that you aren’t aware of in the instant you’re performing them - for example, when your foot automatically jumps to the brakes while driving in a dangerous situation. when people’s eyes are dilated we find them more attractive without even realizing it due to evolution since that means they’re looking for someone. The final example about how the unconscious works that I’ll give is that strippers make more money during certain times of the month, even though men aren’t consciously aware of their fertility levels. All of these decisions that we make - consciously or not - embody who we are, and in order to understand who we are, we need to understand the brain and how it makes decisions. 

However, I'm going to change my presentation after constructive criticism I received. Instead of focusing on this intro, I'll make it shorter and to the point, and make most of my slides into pictures. I also need to explain the graphs in my presentation in a better and clearer way. I need to connect my thoughts better and string them together. Also, I need to actually ask my research question and bring it into context. I need to also come up with some creative ways that my research will be useful, and bring them into the presentation. It's so insane that after Monday afternoon I'll be done with the AP Capstone program!

I'm thankful I have the opportunity to practice it one more time on Monday morning, so that I can fix up any last minute changes that I might need to make.  

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Sending the Paper

The moment we’ve all been waiting for...or at least the moment I’ve all been waiting for...has arrived!! The paper has been submitted and I am officially done with high school!!!!!!!!!! Is this blog post a landmark in my life? Only time will tell. 

I’m not even joking but as I finished writing that sentence I realized that I’m not done with high school yet because I still have to present. This has been really anticlimactic! 

Submitting the paper was so scary - I don’t know why - I was just scared that when the College Board received my paper it would actually be blank or like a picture of my dog from my computer. I really don’t know why but I guess I just have irrational fears? But whatever, to be honest part of me knows deep down that it’s fine, because I’m already in college!!

Last week I said that the results were a surprise. Thank you for your incredible patience. I know, waiting a week was tough. Anyway, the results showed that blink rates were higher for young males, and risk seeking declined with age for males (but not females). Also, in regard to individual questions, people were more risk averse for gains than losses, which is in line with classical findings.  

I talked to professors about my research and even they were like wow, you sat there and counted blinks, more power to you. Yes, I realized that my research was me literally just counting people blinking. Cutting edge technology. I guess I have to start small though. Counting blinks has been somewhat of a life changing experience in that while I was doing my research, when I watched TV, I started counting people’s blink rates. For example, during the State of the Union, I counted Joe Biden’s blinks and compared them to Paul Ryan’s (since they were both sitting behind Obama). Paul Ryan blinked less and I equated that to being less risky and therefore more conservative. Joe Biden blinked more, and as the news will tell you he is kind of impulsive when it comes to saying certain things (I love Joe Biden though so it’s all good). I actually saw Paul Ryan over the summer at the festival that I volunteer at, and after hearing his ideas I was like hmmm..yeah he’s conservative. I didn’t need to see him at a festival to know that though (obviously) but every time I see him on TV I’m like heyyyy! But then I’m like noooooo.. he is very conservative but maybe he’ll get there one day.

I know I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback (THANK YOU!) but honestly I feel like I’m going to be so embarrassed about this blog in like 5 years. Like I actually already am but I just know that it’ll be so much worse in time. 

Anyway have a great week! 

Editing the Paper

After consulting with Mrs. Haag (hi Mrs. Haag) about revising my paper, we decided to add in the nuanced differences that I found with gender, age, and individual questions. Also, I used to think that literally nobody besides Mrs. Haag (hi again) was reading this blog, but 25 people viewed my blog yesterday. That might not sound like a lot of people, but I’m really surprised considering that it had literally zero views for a period of time. What happened? Really, if you aren’t affiliated with BASIS Scottsdale in any way I’d like to know how you found out about this blog. Well also, I posted my blog on Facebook a month ago since a lot of other people in the class were and I thought that was what the school encouraged, so you’re probably just my friend on Facebook. Regardless...

All right, so what I had to do in the first place was go through every single survey and input the answers to each question. There were 50 surveys with 9 questions each. According to my calculations... that means I went through and typed in data for 450 questions. For science!

Then I had to go through each survey and mark whether a male or female filled it out, with his or her respective age. When I initially started surveying people, I did not think that age and gender was a factor in my research. Then, I Skyped my research consultant Bob one day and we decided that the results would be more meaningful if we did in fact include age and gender. Since I had all of the consent forms aligned with the respective survey, I knew who filled out which survey. I went through and assigned gender to each survey and age range. I had a lot of exact ages since a lot of the people I surveyed were 18, but I put the parents in the 40-50 age range. This week, I actually emailed the parents asking for their exact ages, and I got those. I’m scared of asking teachers at my school for their exact ages, though. I think that if I did that then my school would get frustrated with me, since they did not want me to survey teachers in the first place because of confidentiality reasons. So if I found out how old Mr. X is... can you even imagine all of the gossip that would go down? (None. Seriously none. But that’s obviously beside the point.)

Then, once I entered all of the data into a Google spreadsheet (shoutout to Mrs. Haag and that one sentence I wrote in my paper when I was like “This graph was made in a Google spreadsheet”) Bob and I found correlations. The correlations are.... a surprise!! Come back next week and I’ll talk about all of the data. If you’re really interested though you can obviously email me or message me or whatever you’d like, I just need to keep this a surprise on the blog so that I have something to write about next week.

Have a great week!

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Beginning the Presentation

Now that the paper is finished, it's time that I focus on the other part of AP Research: the presentation. Presenting should be a fun experience (I've watched too many TED Talks), and I hope to engage the audience. The question is, though, how do I do this? I need to find a way to make people interested in something they do without even thinking about - blinking. I also need to hold their attention so that they're engaged when I talk about dopamine, and to discuss it so that the audience doesn't feel like they're in a middle school biology class (or this class below in SpongeBob).
 

In order to make people interested, I have decided that what I have to do is begin by talking about the thing that everyone cares about: themselves. No, I'm not just trying to be cynical; it's human nature. The underlying central theme around my paper and around the question I posed has to do with the fact that the majority of who we are and the decisions that we make are not really up to us, but up to our brain chemistries and unconscious. The fact that dopamine plays such a large role in behavior makes one think about how much he or she can control oneself. How would you behave if you had an abnormal amount of dopamine? Would you impulsively gamble or set fires? Much of who we are is determined by how our brains are wired.


So, when I start the presentation, I think I'm going to talk about the question regarding whether we possess free will. How much free will do we really have when so many of our decisions are based on the chemistry of our brains? Then, I'm thinking of talking about how there is so much that we don't know about what drives our behavior, and the implications this has across many fields. For instance, this could have profound implications for the law. Who's to say one is culpable of committing a crime if someone has an abnormality in his or her brain? (However, reaching too far with this concept could be detrimental to the legal system, since then anyone could use the argument that they're not really in charge of their decisions).


After discussing this in the opening, I can then turn to why I chose to study dopamine. I'll go into the details of everything dopamine does, and why it is so important to understand its capabilities and everything it does. Once I relate how my research has to do with everyone and their minds, I think people will be more inclined to listen and be engaged. Maybe I'll try and tell jokes. Probably shouldn't do that though. I have puns! I've realized that puns make some people are really angry though, so I think I'll stay away from those too...(nah.).

In the meantime, I'm going to go shopping for something I can wear for the presentation. I need to look professional, and I think I'm going to buy new shoes.


Thanks for reading and I'll post again next week!
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The Academic Conversation

Hellooooo... Welcome to my fifth blog post! This week I found a shirt that everyone in senior year should buy, even though I didn't buy it myself.

 
I don't know what I'm doing with my hand in this picture, and yes, I know that the letters are backwards in the mirror, but I was reminded of this wonderful blog as soon as I saw the shirt. I knew I had to take a picture and post it on here to advocate for this blog.

In the spirit of "why don't you blog about it" shirts everywhere, let's begin and talk about how my results could actually mean something in life! All right, this might come as a shock, but I didn't take videos of people to sit there and watch them blink just for fun.



I did it because...

Understanding how blink rate indicates certain behavior and mental states is important because it offers a sort of gateway into the brain. The reason behind all of this, and what this paper is really all about is the neurotransmitter dopamine, as I've mentioned before.

Professionals could be able to tell if one is more impulsive based off of blink rates, and this could be useful for a myriad of mental disorders. An example would be Impulse Control Disorders, or ICDs. Some ICDs include pathological gambling, kleptomania (impulsive stealing), pyromania (impulsively setting fires), and intermittent explosive disorder, which is pretty self explanatory (aggressive and explosive outbursts).

Certain treatments could work better if researchers are able to tell the root causes of these behaviors, and could focus on treating the dopamine abnormality that is present in affected brains. 

Also, I've mentioned before that understanding how dopamine affects the brain is important because it could help overcome disorders such as anxiety and schizophrenia.

A study done by German researchers shows that anxiety is linked to dopamine in relation to the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals with fear and anger. The findings of this study suggest a new way of approaching anxiety disorders, which currently affect almost 20% of adults in the United States, according to the DANA Foundation. The German scientist Thomas Kienast led a group of researchers in Berlin in a study that examined how dopamine affects the amygdala. Through using PET and fMRI, the scientists found that those with more dopamine stored in their left amygdalas, which tend to invoke fear more than the right amygdala, were more anxious.


According to the Schizophrenia Research Forum, the most established hypothesis for the cause of schizophrenia is the dopamine hypothesis. Schizophrenia is an immensely complex disorder, and dopamine does not seem to be the only answer, but research shows that there is a direct relationship between excess dopamine levels and schizophrenic behavior and symptoms. This hypothesis provides a large implication for the treatment of schizophrenia. Currently, treatments are focused around abnormal neurotransmitter levels. Further research with dopamine suggests that future treatments should revolve around specific factors that focus on where a dopaminergic funnel point, where dopamine is concentrated.

There is so much more to be discovered! It's truly exciting, and if you're interested in this then there are plenty of articles on research that's been conducted recently and now about all of this. Just google dopamine and how it impacts the brain and certain disorders and you'll be busy reading for a long time.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you come back for my sixth blog post.



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Data Analysis Part Two

Hey! Welcome back. This is the second (and final) discussion of the data analysis.

So, the results turned out well! Here's a picture of the graph: 

When the number of risky decisions were plotted against their respective blink rates, this graph happened. What's really exciting about these results is that the p-value is equal to 0.0018, which means that there is a .0018 chance that these results are random. This means I did in fact find a correlation between blink rate and making risky decisions!

(This is what I felt like when I found out my results.)

My research consultant, Bob, and I  are really excited about these results. Since I surveyed so many different people that vary in age and gender, the next step I am going to take is to do an exploratory analysis. I am going to try and see if there are differences in blink rate when it comes to variation in gender and age. (For the purpose of this paper, though, I am just focusing on the bigger picture and the graph shown above.) 

Of course, I conducted a single study with only 50 people. More experiments need to be done to ensure that blink rate is definitely an indicator of how people will make decisions, but this is certainly a good start. 

There were some outliers, but there usually always are when it comes to collecting data from a large group of people. One person I surveyed is a wealth advisor, and he understood mathematically the risks that I was presenting him with. While most people saw the questions as bets or for sure gains, he went deeper and weighed the actual risks if one were to make the same decision many times. Even though I was presenting these options as a one time choice, it was still interesting to hear someone’s perspective on which decisions were better to make in the long run.

I also talked to someone who took no risks whatsoever. I think that this participant was under the impression that I was trying to get people to make riskier decisions, or that all of the risky options were secretly the “wrong” decisions, so he played all of them safe. However, in my survey I specified in the beginning that there were in fact no wrong answers. I also did not want everyone to answer the questions in one particular manner; I was hoping to see that they tended to prefer riskier answers if their corresponding blink rates were higher. Astonishingly, I found that result!

I would like to once again take this time to thank everybody who participated in my study. I approached many people, and a lot of them just flat out said no. I also promised everyone that I would compensate them with candy, but only three people actually wanted candy afterwards. It was really nice of everyone to help me out. Also, shoutout to my math teacher, Mrs. Bailey, for being really supportive. If you’re reading this, hi! 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you come back next week. 

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Data Analysis Part One

Welcome to my third blog post! This time, I’m going to talk about how I analyzed the data I collected. 

As I mentioned before, when people were filling out the surveys, I watched the videos to count their blink rates. I then wrote down their blink rates on their surveys once they were done with them. Once I had all 50 surveys, I went through each one of them and counted the number of times that person choose a risky answer (out of nine questions total). 

So then I had 50 blink rates with their corresponding number of risky decisions. I put all of my data in a Google spreadsheet, and then figured out what I needed to do to find the p-value, which basically would tell me the significance of my results. 

In order to do this, I had to use MATLAB, which, according to their website, is a high-level technical computing language for algorithm development, data visualization, and data analysis.  

I figure my learning how to use MATLAB is similar to how Marco Rubio learned about EDM (did you know that he said he listens to EDM - electronic dance music that is mostly played at raves?) 

Marco Rubio’s staff: Okay, we need to find something that will make younger people like you more, Marco. 

*Staff google searches something along the lines of “what do teens like”*

*Results for music show up, someone sees an abbreviation called EDM* 

Marco Rubio, after he listened to one song and was briefed on what to say: I like EDM and know what it is! 

My research consultant, Bob: Okay Emily, you should learn how to use MATLAB to analyze your data. 

*Google searches something along the lines of “how to use MATLAB”* 

*Results show up for how to enter data, make graphs, and find certain values*

Me: I like MATLAB and know what it is! 

You see, both Senator Rubio and I have preliminary understandings of what each of our respective things are. Marco needs to learn that EDM is, in fact, not a clean genre of music like he says and that its culture is not really for the GOP. On the other hand, I only have a pretty basic understanding of MATLAB and therefore can’t really compare it (and therefore prefer it) to other types of computer languages. 

MATLAB is super useful though. I had to use codes to put all of the data in a graph and then find the p-value. When I ran it, the p-value was a matrix. I turned to my math teacher, Mr. Peacher, for help, and he sat down with me and we figured out how to run the codes. We both agreed that MATLAB is pretty confusing, but definitely a great tool to know how to use. My goal is to gain a better understanding of MATLAB and other computer languages so that in the future I will be able to analyze data and find exactly what I’m looking for. 

Next week, the results will be written about. Stay tuned! As always, thanks for reading. 

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Implementation of Research

During the month of January, I filmed and surveyed 50 people in total. First, I had every person sign a consent form. After that, I filmed each participant for two minutes, and then gave him or her a survey which had nine questions. Each question presented one option with a definite outcome, and one option with a "risky" (uncertain) outcome. The questions were based on financial decisions.

Here's a question from the survey so you can see:

If you were faced with the following choice, which alternative would you choose?

_ A sure gain of $240

_ A 25 percent chance to gain $1000 and a 75 percent chance to gain nothing.

The people who chose the sure gain were deemed not risk takers, while those who decided to gamble were risky decision makers. 

While the participants were filling out the surveys, I watched the recorded video to count their blink rates. Once I was done watching the video, I deleted it to ensure confidentiality. I then wrote the number of blinks on the respective survey for future data analysis. 

Finding 50 people to participate was a bit of a challenge, but I was able to use anyone over the age of 18 for consent purposes. I used classmates and teachers at my school, but that did not amount to 50. The head of my school, Elizabeth McConaghy, sent out an email to all of the parents of students at my school asking for volunteers. A few people contacted me, and then I had 50 people. I met some people at the library, but most at school. I met with each person in a closed room with no distractions for a measure of control.

The implementation went really well, and I did not encounter anything that I didn't expect. The method I designed basically matched up perfectly with the reality of the experiment. 

The whole experience was really fun, and it reaffirmed my interest in conducting research in college and beyond. It was surprising how many people were (or at least seemed) interested in my research! I think that neuroscience and psychology interest everyone, on at least the most basic level, since they speak to who we fundamentally are. Talking with people made me realize that so many more people would be interested in studying science if the importance of the connection to themselves is clearly made. 

If I had the resources, I would use a lot of fancy equipment like fMRI and EEG to measure dopamine levels in the brain. Since I'm just a high school student, though, blink rate has been the easiest and best way to do this. If blink rate really does turn out to be a significant indicator of dopamine, this would be great for not only the scientific community, but for other places like rehabilitative services and maybe for practices of medicine. Blink rate could tell if someone is more impulsive, and if physicians or caretakers are able to see this in such a non-invasive manner, it would be much more useful when determining which treatments or medications should be prescribed.

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Blinking Outside The Box

Hey there! Thanks for checking out my blog.

I'm Emily, and I'm a senior in high school at BASIS Scottsdale. For my AP Research project, I'm studying how spontaneous blink rate, the rate at which one blinks during a given time frame, impacts how people make decisions. 

I’ve been so fortunate to work with Dr. Bob Wilson at the University of Arizona. Over the summer, we were researching if soccer coaches in the English Premier League had a higher blink rate when their teams won a match. We hypothesized that dopamine activity would be higher if they won since dopamine is a neurotransmitter which helps to control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. 

Through plotting the differences in blink rate between winning and losing coaches as a function of the probability of any result, we found a highly significant correlation between the variables with p = 0.0001. There was a big positive prediction error for the winner and a big negative prediction from the loser, and when those two are subtracted, the number is positive. This was what we predicted, and validates our hypothesis that more dopamine means a higher blink rate! 

My research revolves around dopamine, the neurotransmitter mentioned above. There's a known correlate between dopamine and making "risky" decisions, which are decisions that have an uncertain outcome. There's also a correlation between dopamine and blink rate, and it is thought that the more dopamine one has, the more one blinks. My hypothesis is that the riskier decisions people take, the higher their blink rate will be.  

In order to test this, I met with 50 people and filmed them for two minutes before giving them a survey with nine questions which presented one definite outcome and one risky outcome. While they were filling out the surveys, I watched the videos and counted the number of times they blinked. I then counted the number of times they chose a risky outcome, and will correlate that with the number of times they blinked.

Counting blink rate is a non-invasive and inexpensive way to measure dopamine levels in someone's brain. This could be useful when examining people who have trouble with addiction, because if a physician can tell if someone is more impulsive, certain treatments would work better. On a larger scale, researching how dopamine influences how we make decisions is important because if scientists are able to understand this, it can help overcome ADHD, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. 

There’s also a lot of fun stuff in the media surrounding blink rate. In the film Silence of the Lambs, the psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter doesn’t blink. Some say that sociopaths and psychopaths don’t blink due to low brain activity. Who knows...follow my blog and maybe you can discover someone you know is a sociopath! (I’m kidding, really.)

Disclaimer: This blog will feature a lot of puns related to blinking. Thank you for your interest and I hope you follow my entries.

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