Experimental failure

Well that was a …flop. Today I had an experiment, had. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to an experiment, especially in my line of research. Technology, can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Still, somedays I wish I was living in the future, one where I didn’t need to reset my router randomly. Then I would know for sure the singularity was close.

We were so close! My PI, who is anxious to get this research done, has been pushing us to get things scheduled and do the experiment. COVID had put a halt on it for some time and today we were going to finish with the first of five subjects. The nice thing is that I would be able to start doing the analysis. Even with an N of 1, something is better than nothing, plus getting everything processed and organized as I get the data makes it easier in the end when I try to compare across subjects.

Unfortunately we had some technical issues so we couldn’t do the experiment, everything was going so perfectly too. We were just about to start when I realized the EEG wasn’t recording anything, I mean it was recording something, but it was noise, so nothing useful.

I guess the saving grace is that the equipment decided to break before the experiment and not mid-experiment. Overall this isn’t a huge setback, but it does make more work for me! Oh fun fact, I had spare equipment and the part that broke was the only thing I didn’t have a spare for because I could only find the one in the lab. Isn’t that how it always happens?