Brainwaves and Ego Boosting.

I am feeling very good at the moment for two reasons, firstly I got an A* on my third weekly test and secondly I have spent the past hour being told how great I am. =]

The reason for this ego stroking was I took part in an experiment this morning, it was and EEG (Electroencephalogram) experiment so I had to wear a rather fetching cap like the one which you can see on the left. I first had to wash my hair with baby shampoo to remove any grease from my scalp, then I also had to have alcohol rubbed in to my scalp through the holes in the cap to clean away any more oils. Then Nicola (the experimenter) put a mixture of sand, salt and gelatin through each hole to increase conductivity, nice. I got to watch the Simpsons whilst this was a happening as it takes a while, and it was good because I hadn't seen either of the episodes before.

The experimental tasks were simple, I had a keyboard on my lap and in the first one I had to press the space bar for every capitalized word that wasn't an animal, and in the second one I had to see if the psuedo-word in lowercase sounded the same as the real word in uppercase pressing C for yes and M for no.

Now comes the ego stroking, as it was a test on dyslexics and non-dyslexics I had to do several reading, remembering and spelling measures. The first was reading as many words as possible in a minute - I got to the end with time to spare and no mistakes, the second was a spelling test which I did well on, the third was reading nonsense words as fast as possible - I was very accurate and fast, and the final one was remembering numbers and reciting them forward and then remembering numbers and reciting them backwards - she couldn't believe how much I could remember and said I was by far the best yet. =] All in all a good morning.

I'll speak about Monday's research colloquium in another blog as this one has gone on long enough already! Maybe tomorrow. =]