Future Functional Connectivity Tutorials, and Other Updates

A few notes:

1) The previous functional connectivity posts and tutorials are cribbed from Gang Chen's homepage, which is available here. Kind of like the way I crib quotations and passages from authors that no one reads anymore, and then pass it off as my own style to boost my pathologically low self-esteem. Keep in mind that most of these demonstrations deal with a single subject and simplified situations that you probably will not encounter in your research. Given these contrived examples, most of the results generated in these demos are relatively meaningless; it's up to you to learn and understand the concepts, and then apply them to your own data and make your own inferences. My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of Youtube tutorials, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you understand. That — and no more, and it is everything. (That was Conrad, by the way.)

2) A lot of you - I'm talking a LOT of you players - have been making requests for MELODIC tutorials and resting state analyses in FSL. All I can say is, we'll get there, in time. Before that, however, I believe AFNI is better suited for building up one's intuition, and so we will be working through a few more connectivity topics in AFNI - specifically, context-dependent correlations, beta series correlations, and resting state connectivity. After that we will again cover the same concepts, but applied in FSL - by which time, given my glacial pace, either FMRI will have become a passé technique or the Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into us.

3) Recently you may have noticed the "Donate" button on the right sidebar of the blog. This was done at the request of one reader who felt the powerful, irrational urge to loosen his purse-strings and give some alms out of the goodness of his heart, which is located somewhere way, way down there, somewhere nearabouts the cockles. Although I can't fully understand this behavior - even less than I can understand why there is someone who still has purse-strings, or what cockles are, exactly - nevertheless it helps satisfy my cupidity and strokes my ego. Furthermore, in addition to serving Mammon, these tokens of gratitude motivate me to regularly produce new material and, as a bonus, help me to continue procrastinating on my dissertation. Now that's what I call a win-win-win.

4) Also, at least one of you has mailed me a two-pack of Nutella. This has pleased me greatly. My brain needs hazelnut spread for fuel, and the more it has, the hotter and better it burns.

5) If everything goes according to plan, we should cover context-dependent correlations this weekend, beta series correlations next week, and resting-state connectivity the week after that.

Lunch in Paris, dinner in London, comrade.