Fear Conditioning Study

This anesthesia study that I'm doing had the first opening on the 17th, so I said that was okay but then I came home and NOPE, there's the MRI study on the 17th. So, sadface, I had to email her back and say that I couldn't make it and that we'd have to schedule it for after Christmas, which I did not want to do.

However, the stars aligned and she called me yesterday saying that the girl who was supposed to come in today got the flu and woo, they have an opening. And yep, I just happen to have a four hour chunk of time completely free.

So there were all these restrictions, like I had to get there at 8:30 AM and I had to have a good night's sleep (didn't happen) and I couldn't eat or drink anything from midnight on. I managed to get there on time using a creative combination of subways and buses, and they did the standard height-weight-blood pressure-pregnancy test combo. Some Australian man named Kane (as in Toad? I quipped, and he said No, as in the fictional unhappy mogul who died alone, thanks Mom) came in and told me all about the study, which I had already heard about but suppose must be done for legal purposes. They gave me a shot of lidocaine (sp?) which barely hurt and then came the saline solution IV, which didn't hurt at all.

We just chilled and waited for some dude named James to show up, and everyone was super friendly and talked to me for a long time. This is in stark contract to most studies where they treat you like you're a child and if there isn't anything happening, they leave the room.

Anyways, we went into the Experiment Room (it looked like a small tech room) and they attached the mystery solution (could have been a placebo, don't forget!) to my IV bag. We just hung out for a little longer, and James who finally arrived started with the EKG and the GRS and other abbreviated scientific data collectors.

The first experiment was me sitting in front of a computer while different words flashed on the screen for about a half second. My job was to remember as many as I could. Let me tell you, I was rock city. Citizen Kane said I scored four standard deviations above normal. Hee hee hee, this is in direct opposition to the normal function of my short-term memory. Here were the words, in roughly the same order:

cotton
glory
thorn
ambulance
material
artist
amplifier
deceit
hall
speaker
gender
Socialist
henchmen
slush
kindness
safety

Because I recognize that I have a terrible, terrible memory I started making up a story the first time. It went kinda like, "there's this guy picking cotton for the glory of the South, and oops, all of a sudden he gets stuck with a thorn and needs an ambulance. While in the hospital, he notices that his gown is made of a cottonlike material. He is inspired and becomes an artist, using an amplifier to spread his message. But there's deceitful henchmen in the hall! He's the speaker, deriding the concept of gender and the Socialists, and he has to run out in the slush so he can find kindness and safety."

On the first trial, I was able to remember fourteen words. For the subsequent trials (there were four, administered at various points during the morning) I remembered the entire fun-filled story and didn't miss any. I asked Kane at the end what other people's stories were like, because although they could not have been as exciting as mine they were probably still interesting. He said that everyone else just tried to remember them in order. Lame!

The second one had me hooked up to an electrical apparatus that would give me a small shock (it didn't hurt) at various times as I looked at pictures of yellow and blue squares. It only came after the blue squares at first, and then it never came back. I had to use a joystick to note whether or not I predicted I would be shocked after each shape came up. One neat point: I have no conditioning reflexes. This is not a good thing, I think. Kane said that most everyone else, after being shocked two or three times after the blue squares, would show a huge spike from their galvanized skin receptors even if there was no shock afterwards. He said that mine just stayed steady the entire time.

Next was a really boring one where I had to look at modified Chinese characters and say whether or not I thought they were aesthetically pleasing or not. Easy enough. I learned later that there was a subliminal flash of a face before the character was shown, so it's possible that I was influenced that way. After this, I did the same thing except the subliminal flash was slowed down so that I could just barely see the face and I was instructed to note whether or not I thought it was happy or fearful.

And that was it! They let me pick anything I wanted to eat for lunch from the Amish Market (turkey bacon panini and Pom juice) but I had to just hang around for another hour and a half so they could make sure that I didn't swoon on the bus ride home or anything. Kane informed me that I did indeed get an anesthetic, propylene or something. I was kinda nervous beforehand because the last time I was under anesthetic I was miserable and couldn't stop throwing up on things. Luckily this didn't happen.

They also told me about this other experiment that's going on and I'll probably sign up for it even though it's $20 less. These are lean times, my friends.