Let's see how long I can manage to blog each day about each preparation
Slowly but steadily I'm making progress in my attempts to find out if one can get isolated leech nervous systems to learn. Here are the problems I've been able to solve in the first two weeks:

• Dissection/Hardware
• Recordings with sucktion electrodes
• Modifying MatLab script for digital storage
• Stimulation parameters
• Spontaneous activity

This has allowed me to actually do four full experiments last week, all the while I was still trying out various things and the effect they have on decision-making in the isolated leech nervous system. Now I think I have most of the details down and will start collecting some data to see what the statistics say, beyond the individual variability.

Today, just in time for the fifth preparation, I've been able to install new recording software since the more than provisional MatLab script I was using was less than even bare bones and had various bugs and deficiencies. I'm now using WinEDR (Windows Electrophysiology Disk Recorder), a very capable freeware program from the University of Stratthclyde. Will post a video of the recording screen soon. It's absolutely perfect for the straightforward physiology I'm doing. If you're doing electrophysiology, you should definitely have a look into it! It is this software which has enabled me to automate the experiment enough to ba able to live-blog from the experiment, so to speak. Cutely enough, the first three hits on Google if you search for "Windows Electrophysiology Disk Recorder" are three electrophysiology papers

Today's prep started off like the picture-book example: in the first 10 trials, it generated swimming 6 times and crawling 4 times. I decided to stimulate the anterior ganglion whenever it generated swimming for the next 10 trials. This resulted in a 9-1 S/C ratio for these 10 trials interestingly enough. The final 10 test trials yielded a S/C ratio of 6-3 (the very last stimulation didn't generate any patterned activity at all) which was right back to where it was in the beginning.

This is the second prep that did that and the first one was stimulated upon crawling (and it transiently increased swimming during the training phase as well). I'm starting to get a hunch that the anterior stimulation is transiently biasing decision-making towards swimming, no matter if I stimulate the prep when it generates crawling or when it generates swimming. Or is this anterior stimulation actually rewarding? We'll find out what the data says when I have measured more preps.

Let's see what tomorrow's prep will do. Isn't science exciting? I hope to have a Google spreadsheet filled in some time during this week, for all of you who want to have a look at the raw data (like the two people reading this are actually going to care, lol ).