Science vs. Hair

One of my weird hobbies is participating in research studies.

I have a lot of weird hobbies, actually. But, anyway. There are always research studies of some kind going on at any given college campus, and after taking a certain number of psychology classes you can't help but feel sorry for the poor graduate students that are so desperate to get volunteers--offering extra credit and drawings for prizes in a gamble to draw the obliging freshman. So every now and then I'll sign up, just to be nice. Once, in a weird twist of fate, I walked away from a study with thirty bucks, so I can't complain.

But I might have done more to delay the cause of science then advance it this time.

I signed up for a research study that claimed to be collecting data on decision-making while playing games--sounds like fun, right? So I show up, and they hook me up to an EEG so that they can monitor my brain activity--which, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty awesome.

Have you ever had an EEG taken? If not, you need to know that the device they put on your head is kind of weird. It's got all these little black "sensors" that poke your head at different spots. And they weren't really designed for people like me with thick hair. And they needed ALL the sensors in place to get the data.

The grad student who had the misfortune of putting the thing on me spent ten minutes trying to gently move strands of hair out of the way of the sensors. It was a bust.

So then she started spraying my hair with a water bottle to make it more manageable.

After twenty minutes of that, her supervisor came to see what the hold up was. He tried messing around with my hair a bit more, then got some sort of special hair gel that was supposed to help without interfering with the sensors. So the two of them started using the gel to stick up random strands of my hair out of the way. By this point, in my reflection in the computer monitor, I looked like Ana getting out of bed in Frozen.

Yeah, like that.

Anyway, after another twenty minutes, they finally got it working. Then I saw the inner workings of my brain--as a series of lines on a computer screen. I did think it was kind of cool that some of the lines went crazy when they told me to wiggle my fingers.

The "games", alas, were not very interesting--just a few variations on the Prisoner's Dilemna, which I invariably lost. And then they took the sensors off and I went to class with my classy new hairdo.

Well, I guess I'll stick that personal sacrifice in the list of sacrifices made FOR SCIENCE! It might not be the same level of personal inconvenience donated to the cause by such greats as Marie Curie and Nicola Tesla, but, hey, letting people muss my hair up for science has to count for something.

You're welcome.