This is going to be a short post. I need to write it, but I have the brain power of a turnip right now, so I won't go into detail. I've just returned from a 9-hour day of navigation testing at the University of Pennsylvania. Fittingly, the day began with me marching seven blocks in the wrong direction while trying to walk from my bed-and-breakfast to Penn's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Still, after I found the place and met my gracious researcher hosts, I tested quite well. I spent a very long time learning my way around eight virtual cities in two different experiments and then took my turn in the MRI. I had imagined an MRI to sound like a photocopy machine, whirring reassuringly as it scanned the brain. It's actually a little like being trapped under the hood of a car when the alarm is blaring. On the plus side, I was able to see a few of the scans immediately afterward, giving me the first piece of hard evidence on this odyssey: I do in fact have a brain.
Another day of testing tomorrow, but thankfully most of it is outdoors. No computers. No floating through the fantastic, virtual ghost towns. No super-charged magnetic sarcophagus.
I'll supply more detail on my lab-rat day and get into the science of all this soon.
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Congrats on validating the "have a brain" hypothesis. Next up: do you have a soul?
ReplyDeleteWas the MRI after the "virtual city" experiments specifically to learn something about that how you react to the experiment, or just a test to baseline you for the tests to come? Or was it just "MRI for the hell of it?"
Lastly, not to screw with your testing, but if you accidentally wander into Capogiro (13th and Sansom and perhaps new locations since I was last there), you'll be rewarded with better gelato than you can find anywhere in Boston. I would have loved to see an MRI or PET scan of myself the first time I went there...
I sure hope my soul's not missing. As Al Pacino (aka Lt. Colonel Frank Slade) noted, "there is no prosthetic for that." The other line from that movie I like to quote, at night, is, "I'm in the dark here!"
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the MRI was indeed specifically done to see how my brain reacted to the virtual city navigation.