The woman whose check I lost has just learned that she has a mass in her brain. Please pray for her, if you would, because she is waiting to find out more and she is pretty worried. Sooo I think I am going to dig through the recycling, because she does not need anything else on her list of stuff to take care of. Stuff of which to take care. You know what I mean. Thank you for your comments. They helped me to feel less like a flake.
I haven't posted anything about this new semester yet but I'm excited about it. I'm taking a class in the psychology department that looks like it will be really fun. We're talking about early brain development. Today the prof played the most amazing recording for us. This researcher found a ewe that was very close to delivering twin lambs and put microphones on the heads of the lambs through a cesarean-esque incision. Then she was sewn back up and they recorded what the world sounds like to babies in utero. Or at least to babies in utero ovis. It was much, much clearer than I would have guessed. It made me feel guilty about the yelling at older children I did when I was pregnant, because it apparently came through loud and clear. At least the new baby got acclimated to a sound he would hear post-natally. [heavy sigh]
Did you know that babies on the third day of life can recognize stories they heard in the womb? Isn't that mind-boggling? (Or did everybody know this except me?) Oh, here's another mind-boggling thing. I knew that researchers measured babies' sucking patterns with specially adapted pacifiers to assess their preferences, but I didn't know that they give the babies choices. Suck more slowly, and you hear your mom reading the story she read you at 7 months' gestation. Suck more quickly, and you hear a stranger reading the same story. For another set of babies, it might be that sucking quickly gets you mom reading the familiar story, and sucking slowly means you hear mom reading an unfamiliar story. The babies -- did I mention they were 56 hours old? -- learn how to elicit the recording of mom reading the familiar story, because that's what they like best. Amazing, huh?
I'm also doing an independent study focused on phonological theory. The reading so far is a little painful, but I'm hopeful that it will get better. The nice thing about blogging my way through grad school is that I can scroll back through my archives and say, "Huh, I forgot how that stumped me. It's not so hard after all." The professor and I are talking about alternatives to the theories I learned in grad school the first time. I have been trying to remember if those approaches seemed intuitively evident the first time, or if I found them difficult going. I know there was a time when I didn't have a clue about the classification system that seems like second nature now, but I can't remember what it was like, getting from clueless to clueful. Clued? Clueous?
Oh! Data! I have data for my early research project! Not very much data so far (n = 23; not all of those are going to be usable), but I'm optimistic that more responses will keep trickling in. I'm hoping for 60. We'll see. I'm looking at the effect of an environmental variable on a condition with a genetic basis. So far my results support my hypothesis, but I have laughably small numbers for one group. Still! My preliminary results support my hypothesis! Join me in a geeky little happy dance, please.
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