I've got myelin sheaths like woooah.
The CU psychology department has a rather amusing way of finding lab rats: it offers unsuspecting intro students extra credit for letting themselves be experimented upon. I took the bait today, and rented my gray matter out to a grad student at a 2.5 points-per-hour wage. She explained that I would be hooked up to an EEG (Electrozap Entelligence Grapher), pulling out of a bucket of saline solution a hundred-thousand dollar hairnet. Including the short panic that ensued when it knocked one of my tragus piercings out, the apparatus on a whole took a half hour to get on my head -- and now, I only wish I could have gotten a photo of it. Try to picture 100 bulbous electrodes suctioned onto my cranium, all strung together with sinewy red and blue wires in a tight criss-cross network, saline dripping down my face from it in little crusty rivulets. Maybe not as cool as my 1960s Stalinist sailor's cap, but definitely coming close.
She turned on a computer screen for me and, as if by magic, I got to witness for the first time the perpetually jolting pencil-scratch waves of my newly electrified head. She did this to explain to me why it was that if I blinked at all over the next two hours I would trigger the electrodes and thus throw off all hope of scientific progress, but I was only half listening: I wanted to make the brain waves do tricks. I thought alternately of sounds, colors, smells, faces, indefinite integrals, but nothing seemed to make any obvious difference. The lines seemed determined to stick to their quick, steady rhythm. In one moment of remarkable idiocy, I even tried thinking louder at the machine ("Hey! HEY! HEEEEEEEEEEEY, I'M THIIIIIIIIIIIIIINKING!!"), but, as anyone with more than a brainstem should be able to guess, that didn't do too much either. She then turned the graphs off, and I promised to let my eyeballs dry into toast before daring to blink.
The experiment itself was somewhat dull: words would flash on a screen in an order somewhat reminiscent of English sentences, and I had to rate their understandability by pushing one of four buttons. Salt water from the electrodes would dribble into my contacts meanwhile, adding a bit more excitement to the process. I guess I must have let my concentration slacken after a while, allowing my brain to float around and scavenge for entertainment while trusting my Wernicke's area to the lab work, because the grad student stopped the experiment at one point to peek at me from behind the cabinets with a worried look.
"Are you okay?" she asked. "I'm picking up a lot of weird signals from your right hemisphere."
"I'm fine!" I try to assure her, "just random." I spent the rest of my electrode time trying to keep short the leash on my thoughts, probably to little avail.
As a corrollary to this, I was also asked to write interpretations of some of the semi-English sentences. The EEG was taken off, but my ability to concentrate scientifically was by then long gone. I would be asked to explain the meaning of the sentence "She gave him a dinner that spoke," and find my first thought to be, She forgot she had to kill the babies before serving them. But inhibitionatory reflexes remind me that Science, for all her wisdom, has little taste for sarcasm. "Her dinner-making abilities were superb to the point of fluency," I write instead.
I think I might sign up for more of these.
She turned on a computer screen for me and, as if by magic, I got to witness for the first time the perpetually jolting pencil-scratch waves of my newly electrified head. She did this to explain to me why it was that if I blinked at all over the next two hours I would trigger the electrodes and thus throw off all hope of scientific progress, but I was only half listening: I wanted to make the brain waves do tricks. I thought alternately of sounds, colors, smells, faces, indefinite integrals, but nothing seemed to make any obvious difference. The lines seemed determined to stick to their quick, steady rhythm. In one moment of remarkable idiocy, I even tried thinking louder at the machine ("Hey! HEY! HEEEEEEEEEEEY, I'M THIIIIIIIIIIIIIINKING!!"), but, as anyone with more than a brainstem should be able to guess, that didn't do too much either. She then turned the graphs off, and I promised to let my eyeballs dry into toast before daring to blink.
The experiment itself was somewhat dull: words would flash on a screen in an order somewhat reminiscent of English sentences, and I had to rate their understandability by pushing one of four buttons. Salt water from the electrodes would dribble into my contacts meanwhile, adding a bit more excitement to the process. I guess I must have let my concentration slacken after a while, allowing my brain to float around and scavenge for entertainment while trusting my Wernicke's area to the lab work, because the grad student stopped the experiment at one point to peek at me from behind the cabinets with a worried look.
"Are you okay?" she asked. "I'm picking up a lot of weird signals from your right hemisphere."
"I'm fine!" I try to assure her, "just random." I spent the rest of my electrode time trying to keep short the leash on my thoughts, probably to little avail.
As a corrollary to this, I was also asked to write interpretations of some of the semi-English sentences. The EEG was taken off, but my ability to concentrate scientifically was by then long gone. I would be asked to explain the meaning of the sentence "She gave him a dinner that spoke," and find my first thought to be, She forgot she had to kill the babies before serving them. But inhibitionatory reflexes remind me that Science, for all her wisdom, has little taste for sarcasm. "Her dinner-making abilities were superb to the point of fluency," I write instead.
I think I might sign up for more of these.