Dear Anon,

I feel your pain, but there are a couple work-arounds for this seemingly quirky nature. First this FAQ describes one other motivation for this session system based on the automatic warping to tlrc space. If a transformation is not otherwise defined, the transformation will be based on the first anatomical dataset that contains a talairach transformation.

[afni.nimh.nih.gov]

To display data from multiple directories, you can use the -dset option to AFNI as in

afni -dset dir1/*.HEAD dir2/*.HEAD

and both dir1 and dir2 datasets will show up in the same "session."

Or do a recursive search from a parent directory by doing this:

afni -dset `find . -name "*.HEAD"`

and all AFNI format datasets in the path and subdirectories should be in your dataset lists. For either of these commands, you can use "*.nii" for NIFTI files too.

Another way is to set AFNI_GLOBAL_SESSION to point to a directory that will be included with the regular session data.

In all these cases, you need to be careful regarding the talairach transformation
assumed in the afni GUI. Quoting from the previously mentioned FAQ:
the first anatomical dataset with a transformation in each directory will be
chosen as the anatomy parent for all "orphan" datasets in that directory. This
means that when combining multiple scanning sessions, even of the same
subject, in the same directory, you must be careful to set the anatomy parents
correctly. Otherwise, you will get incorrect transformations to Talairach
coordinates applied to some of your functional datasets.


Daniel
P.S. I am not "anonymous" either.