roboppy.net

I thought needing to give myself a crash-course in Movable Type was pretty bad. But not much can compare to wearing a cap with electrodes and getting goo syringed onto your scalp and sitting in a dark room for an hour...

Okay, it really wasn't that bad. What the heck am I talking about anyway? I volunteered to be a guinea pig for the psychology department on Thursday for an experiment that would test my brain waves as I solve spacial and verbal problems. A cap resembling a swimming cap except with a chunk of wires coming out of it and little metal circles dotting the surface had to be applied to my head, which took about half an hour. It took longer later to actually get it working because my head was being very uncoopereative. Before I got to the point of being hooked up to a computer though, the student who was testing me (a very nice junior majoring in psychobiology) had to apply the cap to my head. Besides the cap, I also needed some electrodes to be attached around my eye area and one behind each ear. Apparently blinking really interferes with brain activity so they had to take that into account while I was actually being tested. And to make all the connections between the electrodes and my brain work, she had to syringe this brown goo into all the little circles. [shmook] That was definitely interesting. I don't know what was in it, but it was slightly brownish, kind of like...well, I don't know what to compare it to, actually. The goo had a real name, but I prefer to call it head goo, or electrode goo, or brain goo, and so on.

After I got the cap on my head and the other electrodes around my eyes, I went into the testing room, which was a small room with two computer monitors. There we found out that the connections weren't very optimal. A faculty member came in to help make the connections better, which we could observe on one of the screens as a map of all the connections on my head. Each connection was represented by a square with a certain number and letter combination and all the ones on my head were at their lowest level, represented by bright pink. After a pretty long time to moving the electrodes around, applying more goo, and digging the elctrodes as far as they could go into my head without making their way into my brain cavity, we got the connections up to the green point, which was good enough (blue was the strongest). They said that sometimes people's connections work right off the bat, but not always. Maybe my head's too fat or something? Hm...

The student showed me my brain waves on the monitor. I have brain waves, yes! It was a rare sight. Every time I blinked, the waves would suddenly spike, which was kind of cool. If you keep blinking then I guess your thought processes would be somewhat impaired? Hm.

Then the testing began. I don't have qualms with being in a small dark room with a computer, but after about 15-20 minutes I started feel very woozy. Somewhat queasy. Extreme lethargy came over me...damn you, body, what's going on? Some form of claustrophobia? It didn't make much sense and I felt bad for my tester because I don't think she's ever had to deal with someone nearly falling asleep and feeling like puking before. Anyhoo, the tests were pretty simple, not that I got them all 100% right, but I showed some level of intelligence (on par with paramecium). My tests required me to either press the left when I saw a match on the screen and the right if I didn't. The screen was totally black and there were 12 positions for a letter to flash for a split second. There were three tests for each the spatial and verbal testing, for which I had to one practice round and two full rounds.

In the spatial test, first I had to determine whether a letter was showing up in the upper left corner closer to the center of the screen. If it did, I'd press match, and if not, then I'd press mismatch. That was the easy one, though. The second test was the hardest one in which I had to press match if the letter was in the same place as the one twice before it. In the last test I had to determine if the letter was in the same place as the one right before it. The students said I did well in the spacial tests, which wasn't usual for females and meant I could do well in chemistry. I thought that was funny...I don't associate myself with doing well in ANY science. I have bad memories from 10th grade chemistry class, but now I'd be interested in taking a course, maybe over the summer.

By this time in the experiment though, I was feeling pretty sick. I messed up a lot more in the verbal testing, probably because I'm worse at it and I was yawning every two seconds and feeling pukish. :| The verbal tests were like the spatial ones except I had to match letters instead of locations. I would think people would do better on the spacial test since there aren't as many placements to remember as letters and I'd think it's harder to confuse locations than letters (I was supposed to stare at the center of the screen and sometimes I think I confused Ts with Fs), but maybe that's just me. I took a little break during this test since I felt pretty bad, but I managed to finish everything.

After my cap was taken off, I found that my hair was quite matted down with goo and I had some marks on my face from where those electrodes were. Eek! Thank god my jacket had a huge hood that I could wear back to my dorm. And upon arriving to my dorm, I promptly went to the shower to wash my hair (but I haven't taken a shower since then..um, no one cares).

So, that was Thursday. I didn't do much yesterday and I doubt I'll be doing anything today. In fact, I might stay inside my room all day. That's what I do when I stay in school: nothing. Last night I was thinking how much I don't fit into a college and how I'd rather be home. I just found out that someone in my Japanese class decided to take off for the semester. Man, I wish I could do that. It's not that I hate it here, but honestly, I'm not going to make super-good friends here. I haven't already and it's kind of late for me to feel like trying. I don't know what normal people do...

I realized that I've been maintaining blogs since I was in 9th grade. It's been nearly five years. (And I've been maintaining websites since 7th grade...I kept an online journal in 8th grade, but that wasn't a blog.) I read this interesting article about blogging (taken from odradek and it made me realize that...this is how I am. Kind of screwed. I mean, I don't totally fit into the blogging sphere because I don't write EVERYTHING that's on my mind, like really personal things, among other things, but I guess since I'm really shy I'm just more inclined to blogging? I don't know. Meh..MEH! Nevermind.

I got my Rufus Wainwright ticket for next Saturday's concert yesterday. WOO! Happy. The people selling the tickets didn't set up their table on time and there were loads of us just standing around. Rufus for $8 is very good though. I'd think the next best thing is seeing Rufus for free. The opener is Rainer Maria, of whom I've heard some music before, but not much. I hope I can get a good seat, but I'm not sure how early I'll have to start waiting. And I don't know if I can take photos, but since I didn't read anything saying I couldn't, I hope I can. :)

Oh well, I may as well prepare myself for a day of doing nothing but eating and doing homework and website crap...