For the Love of Research

Margaret Martinez is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Spring 2016 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on synesthesia under Dr. Simon Lacey.

I had just begun to enter the world of research when I first arrived to Emory University. In high school, I worked under an M.D./Ph.D. at a psychiatric institute processing MRI images, and quite frankly, I often felt like I had no idea what I was doing. Despite my constant feelings of confusion and being out of my depth, there was something about research that pulled me in, so as a freshman, I participated in the Research Partners Program. I began my work on synesthesia in Sathian lab having no idea what synesthesia even was. Now, after a year of practice of learning, I can automatically explain that synesthesia is a crossing of the senses. It’s when a person has an automatic sensory response to an unrelated stimulus with the most common type of synesthesia being grapheme-color. My research had to do with comparing those who experience synesthesia to everyday controls. There are some papers in the past that suggested synesthesia lies along the same spectrum as cross-modal correspondences. Cross-modal correspondence is a phenomenon when people associate a stimulus in one modality with a seemingly unrelated stimulus in another modality. For example, most people associate high pitch with high elevation. When the year came to a close, I knew I wanted to sign on for another year of research at my lab. I also decided to become a peer mentor to pass on what I learned from my time as a SIRE student. I had the opportunity to present this research both at the end of the year and at the SfN Conference last October. Now, following up on that research I’m looking at how synesthesia relates to the associations made in metaphors.

I love my research. I love being able to meet new people through it, and I find myself engrossed while listening to the synesthetes talk about their individual experiences. One girl, I recall, explained to me how the frequency of letters in a language affected her ability to learn them. Some languages had a lot of silvers and blues and it appealed to her. While others, had a lot of harsher reds and yellows that made the words become more overwhelming to look at.  Another synesthete told me how she used to complain as a toddler how the letters hung on her preschool wall were in all the wrong colors. Some realized early on that they had synesthesia especially when their parents also had it while others had never even realized that their perceptions were unique until they heard about the study. I love talking about my research with people and being able to get feedback from people who have experience in the field.

Of course, there are also a lot of problems that need to be worked through when it comes to research. Not everything always goes as planned, and that’s, for better or worse, just part of the process. Throughout my first year and beyond, I dealt with double booked rooms, broken laptops, no-shows, rude participants, participants that never seemed to want to leave and more. When I’m only working 8 hours a week and each participant needing 2 hours scheduled, every time I couldn’t get data was very frustrating. Processing the data took some to get down as well. When I first started, processing for one person took about 3 hours of my time. Thankfully, I had amazing mentors to help me along and teach me the miracle of pivot tables. As commonly happens with research, the problem we ran into was funding. All my participants were paid cash $10/hour and when gathering a study together, this can quickly add up. Although there are people willing to volunteer to be a part of the study, they are few and far between. Even more frustrating was trying to find a specific population willing to volunteer. If finding synesthetes wasn’t hard enough, I was forced to take on an even bigger challenge before funding came through. This, however, was a challenge I gladly accepted, and fortunately, thanks to Undergraduate Research Programs, I no longer have to worry quite as much about finances. The research process is a long, complicated one full of unexpected twists sometimes. With response from reviewers, I have found myself revisiting my freshman year research project. With more feedback and more subjects, I sometimes find what I’m expecting and sometimes find just new questions. Either way, I’ve learned a lot and become more and more interested in my subject matter.

Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.