Week 0: Buffering... Buffering... The Cognition of Waiting

Don’t you know the feeling? The split second your heart stops when you see the “typing…” bubbles in text messages vanish without a text. The pit in your stomach when you refresh the college application portal, knowing the result is out, but the page hasn’t loaded yet.

We live our lives in a state of digital anticipation. But have you ever wondered what that suspense is actually doing to your brain?

Welcome to my Senior Project! I’m exploring the neuroscience behind “anticipatory anxiety,” which is specifically, how the stress of waiting for an evaluation (like a grade or a notification) changes the electrical signals in your brain and affects your ability to perform cognitive tasks.

My research focuses on a specific event-related potential in the brain called Contingent Negative Variation (CNV). This is essentially an electrical build-up that happens when you are expecting a stimulus.

If you’re a sprinter, this can help as you’re waiting for the gun to go off, but in the context of academic stress, I suspect this signal goes haywire. My hypothesis is that when we are under the “threat of evaluation,” this neural buildup becomes a distraction rather than a helper, effectively short-circuiting our ability to focus on the task right in front of us.

ALTHOUGH the brain wave graphs are super cool to look at, I’m not just doing this to generate art. By the end of this project, I aim to connect the abstract concept of evaluative threat to concrete biological data.

I plan to produce two things:

1. A formal research paper regarding CNV and cognitive performance.
2. A Practical Toolkit for Educators and Students. This will be an online guide that translates my findings into plain English, offering suggestions on how teachers can structure grading and feedback to save our sanity, and how students can manage that “waiting anxiety.”

I will be conducting this research and data analysis under the mentorship of Dr. Zaidi, a professor at San Jose State University, at his IntelliScience Institute (https://insinstitute.com/advisory-board.html).   

But why me? I’m a high school senior. I live in the world of anticipation, notifications, and validation just as much as anyone else. This project is my attempt to understand the biological machinery behind the anxiety my friends, I, and so many others feel each day.

Over the next ten weeks, expect updates and explanations on my process, and hopefully, some validation that yes, refreshing your email 50 times a day is actually exhausting. I also have experience with EEG systems, developing a patent-pending ptosis aid that relies on the technology, as well as analyzing the effect of noise on brain signals. 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll stay to hear more from me in the upcoming weeks!

– Josh Peter