Lab Rats (and Silly Hats)

I’ve found a way to make a couple of extra pounds while I’m hanging around Oxford’s science block. Now don’t be alarmed…I haven’t started selling my blood yet. Just my brainpower. So far I’ve made over 75 pounds (that’s…let’s see…$120?) by helping out around some of the psych labs. And okay fine, when I say helping out, I mean acting as a test subject. But I'm a poor impoverished college student, so I’d still say the ends justify the means.

My induction into the ranks of lab rats was given by David S. and his wunder-colleague Marco. After a day of being trained in a dark room to pick out the lighter of two grainy grey squares on a computer screen, David and Marco had me don an exciting electrode-covered cap and hooked me up to the EEG machine, a lengthy process that involved a lot of saline solution and grinding of sponges into my scalp. Interestingly, the sound I made while Marco and David were working away was also “eeg.” At last, I was ready to go. I had the cap on for recording any electrical impulses and the keyboard in my lap for selecting the correct box, and I was sitting in my little metal room looking at the computer screen.

The task went like this: center your vision on a black screen until two grey boxes flash up, choose the box that is slightly less grey with the corresponding keyboard buttons, and then touch a third button if you think you made a mistake. Yes, this type of research could definitely have cosmic repercussions. In phase one, if you answered right but thought you got it wrong, you lost ten pence, whereas the other combinations were plus or minus two pence. In phase two, you lost ten pence if you answered incorrectly but thought you got it right. That probably makes no sense, but trust me when I say there are strategies for making the most money, strategies that caused my brain to go up in a cloud of smoke. Marco and co. measured my thoughts and, inadvertently, my level of anxiety – neural activity is electrical in nature, but so is muscle movement, and midway through the first trial I discovered a loophole that made my jaw clench and my back stiffen and my shoulders tense while I wrestled with an ethical issue of epic proportions. After I resolved the moral crisis by deciding to play the game according to the rules, pennies be damned, my neural signal was very nice and pretty (apparently), but showed signs of being exhausted. I think Marco was laughing at me in German guffaws. At the end of the experiment, I was too scared to ask D. and M. if they had intended to cause me to question my core values, choosing instead to skip down the hall with 30 pounds in my hot little hand. I’m a complex individual.

And onto the next experiment…with Riikka the sadistic yet friendly Swedish postgrad student. I think being a psych experimenter calls for a bit of a desire to crush the human spirit. Where David and Marco used electroencephalography, Riikka employed TEM, which involves magnets but is nothing like MRI. I did get earplugs and another hat – a white cap that made me look like a water polo player, or an epileptic. TEM is this space-age technology that uses electromagnetic fields not to measure brain signals, but to actually stimulate – instigate – a neural reaction. So yeah, mind control. Riikka was focusing on my motor cortex, specifically the part of my brain that controls the muscles between my first finger and thumb. In trying to find this sweet spot, though, she zapped my facial muscles…so that was different. And, in keeping with all those reflex tests I fail, I am a little dead inside, and we had to up the magnetic zapping to 60 or 70% to get the amplitude of signal in my hands. Some serious face spasms were had; I felt like Mr. Phipps of 8th grade mathematical fame, post-stroke. Ahaha…not funny. Yes. Riikka stood behind me and shocked my cranium with an electromagnet while her nameless assistant (I shall call her Igor. Okay, Igorette.) showed me little clips of a woman gesturing goofily. My hands jerked about uncontrollably on my lap as I labeled the clips as single motions, repeated motions, or stills. Some of the motions were then revealed to me by Igorette to be sign language…I learned things like book, cat, trousers, and chef, and then sat back down for round two of TEM where I identified the same gesture videos. I think Riikka was trying to see if my arms moved more when stimulated after seeing a real sign and less when seeing something still, but I'm not exactly sure because I never got debriefed. (Ooh!) I guess the UK doesn’t have the same kinds of human research laws. Which actually makes me a little nervous about the rest of the experiment…but no, I’m fine. No probdf!lkk.3sdglems at lall.sf.@.

The last experiment I did was more sedate, and involved not a single hat, although I did have to wear some large, sound-cancelling headphones. This time around, I was not zapped or probed, and I even made friends with Jennifer, an Irish postgrad working in the linguistics lab. She gave me some advice about how to get into some of the labs around Oxford short of signing up for neural rewiring. We met five times for half an hour each time, and mostly I just spent the time watching these videos of puppets hitting each other and saying things in gibberish. I did have to take this intelligence type test on the first day where I looked at three little abstract pictures and pick the one that will complete the pattern, or repeated nonsense words like “ensclivereminence and “pramascenate” back from a tape, or defined big English words. Which was actually quite difficult – what is the definition of “balloon” (expandable plastic...bag...filled with air or water?) or “purpose” (ummm, mission? calling?) – although I only got stumped by “panacea.” The results of that test at least say I’m not terribly stupid.

Which is actually a problem for these experiments, I think? I wonder what kind of results the experimenters here are getting, with their test subjects being a bunch of inquisitive Oxford psych students who are trying to get the bottom of any test to figure out what, exactly, is going on. Anyway, I think I’ll continue to sign up for these little adventures while I’ve got the time; money aside, it’s an interesting way to explore the different facilities and meet the up-and-coming researchers around Oxford, even if it isn’t the most prestigious way to go about it. I’ve just been alerted to a new study that could double my income, and it even pays for transportation…I’d just have to get injected with some sort of drug and then be subjected to different painful stimuli…hmm. Well, maybe I’ll keep looking.