Read the Raw Signal

Level 0 is the part of the ladder most courses skip: six lessons on the signal itself, before any processing. The first three explain where the signal comes from and how it becomes a file — the cortical currents behind a scalp map, the electrodes and montages that pick them up, and the amplifier, sampling and file format that record them. The last three teach you to read that file by eye: set up a viewer and recognize the awake rhythms and state changes, name every common artifact from a five-second trace, and run a first-look checklist that turns what you saw into a written report.

The judgment thread opens at L0.4 and runs through every later level: each lesson from there on contains at least one “look at the data and decide” exercise. Work the lessons in order — each one assumes the vocabulary of the one before — and finish with the capstone, which asks for exactly these skills, in this order, on one raw file from each spine dataset.