Mobile Brain Imaging: Of Perks and Pitfalls
I recently hitched on the bandwagon of mobile brain imaging research (also MoBI – although that essentially includes intensive recording of bodily movement dynamics) and have, over the past year, had a long look at EEG data sets recorded from subjects in various states of locomotion and body posture.
The thing that had become really apparent to me, over years of observing EEG experiments conducted on participants who were not allowed to move a muscle while in session, was that the field would be really well served by increasing the freedom of movement of its subjects. While there are arguably certain brain processes that may be considered ‘rudimentary’ or ‘primal’ enough to investigate in humans and animals in such immobilized (and often sensory deprived) states – think early perceptual processes – much of the knowledge we infer from these particular studies appears to me to be more about the neurobiology of the brain and its sensory tool set in a narrow sense, rather than the neuropsychology of humans. In other words, if outcomes of such studies are taken to apply to humans normally functioning in their natural environments, we are hardly justified to do so. For this reason, the opportunity to investigate moving human subjects with EEG is a truly exciting one, but certainly not without its methodological and analytical challenges.
In the following pages I will attempt to write down a couple of my insights and observations with recording EEG from mobile subjects, hoping it may be of some help to others. My experience with traditional EEG research was and still is somewhat limited, and there are obviously experts in the field much better qualified than me to educate others on some of the topics I present here. However, while looking for answers during my own process of sifting through the data, I was unable to find any guidance on the low-level observations of the sort I am looking to write about here. Naturally the growing scientific literature on the topic of mobile brain imaging deals with much of the issues I discuss too, but I have yet to find one that goes down to the individual data-set level to make sense of what one sees when looking closely at mobile EEG data.
I owe thanks to a number of people who have shown, and miraculously still do show the patience to teach me the ropes of MoBI/EEG research, and I should probably reference a lot more sources than I could/can come up with while writing the first pages of this site. This web site will be an ongoing project, so expect some updates here and then, and feel free to approach me with any questions, suggestions or corrections (- if you can find my email-address of course; be creative with my first and last name, a dot, and an @gmail.com extension, and you’ll figure it out).