Thanks Bryan! Good luck with your project!

The force is strong in you. You did not create it, your computer did, because it knows how badly you want to do forest & waterside history research. Boom, you’re a Jedi.

Wow, theres teams of 4th graders out collaborating on the web…for group neuroscience projects. 

I was a totally unmotivated 4th grader.

…all that time I spent studying the San Francisco gold rush, and building dioramas out of shoeboxes should have been spent on career development! Where were the mentors?! I needed to be starting a hedge fund, not playing in hedges! And with my paltry kickball skills, I should have been focusing on team and process optimization. What was I doing?!

The radio frequency basically uses resonance to excite protons spinning at a certain frequency. That frequency is determined by the magnetic field the proton is in. One the proton is excited, it spins faster and faster until it tips on its side like a top. This is called precession. So, when the proton spins on its side, it creates this oscillating magnetic field in the “transverse plane,” a direction orthogonal to the receiver coil. Basically this becomes like a magnet going inside a coil, which as Faraday proved, induces a current in the coil. But it takes a lot of these protons spinning on their side together, all in the same phase, to make a net signal strong enough to induce a current in the receiver. When they spin out of phase the net magnetic field in the transverse plane decreases, causing the signal to decrease. This can happen when theres local inhomogeneities in the machine’s magnetic field, bone tissue interfaces, or paramagnetic effects of deoxygenated hemoglobin—the latter of which powers the BOLD signal. Sorry to answer so late, I just saw this!