Physiology 101

My only class this semester is physiology. The best part of the class was not having to buy a textbook. The professor promised that everything we needed to know would be in her notes. The section I am in is basically online. We can attend a weekly 90 minute session if we want but after attending twice I decided it wasn't worth the time. So my study time is simply reading our professor's notes and answering some questions. We have a weekly test on Thursday which keeps any of us from falling behind.

I do need to attend a weekly lab which is usually interesting. We were randomly assigned to groups the second week and my group is learning to work together and what is expected of us. This past week we did the experiment we designed using an EEG which looks at brain waves. We were looking at beta waves which are most prevalent when we are awake and paying attention. The theory states that alpha waves are more common when our eyes are closed and beta waves are more common when our eyes are open even if we are trying to see in the dark. We wondered what would happen if we blindfolded our subjects and compared the beta wave frequency of when they were just sitting there and when they were listening to a story. Based on the theory it would seem that beta waves would become more frequent when we focused on listening. In reality the opposite happened. Beta wave frequency actually dropped as we listened to the story. Part of my role in this lab report is to come up with some theories as to why we obtained those results. Hopefully I can find a few reports from similar experiments to help me out. I have an extra week to do the work since this week is Spring Break.