For Science!

Since I’ve been living in Cambridge and have a fair amount of free time, I decided to sign up to be a participant in some Harvard School of Medicine research studies. Not the type of studies where they inject you with experimental drugs and perform psychological tests on you, but the ones where they need healthy control subjects to observe. I figured it would be more interesting than staying at home and I’d be helping someone’s research, which appeals to me. Plus they give you a few bucks for your time, so who am I to say no?

The first study was today, and it was… interesting. The research group studies vision using what the graduate students in charge of recruitment described as “boring video games”. The description was pretty accurate: I spent three hours in a small, dark room staring at a computer. What I didn’t expect was that the experiment were kind of tough. In the first one, I was shown a bunch of CT chest scans and I had to locate “tumors” as if I were a radiologist. The tumors were just grey spheres, but they were really hard to find! The software I was using was mimicking that used by real radiologists, so apparently I shouldn’t be a radiologist. All of my patient would have died. In the second test I “picked berries” by clicking on bright red squares while avoiding the dull red squares. They were practically impossible to tell apart. I really wanted to ask what that experiment was supposed to be testing, but I figured that, as a research subject, I probably wasn’t supposed to know.

Normally that would be the end of the story, except my appointment was made even more interesting because it was interrupted by an earthquake! It’s been a long time since I’ve felt one, so at first I wasn’t sure what was happening. I could feel the whole room swaying, but for some reason I though it was just a really strong wind. A moment after I realize what must be going on, a graduate student rushed in and asked me to come out of my testing closet an into the main room. Several students from California were discussing all the intense earthquakes they’d been through, but in the end nothing much happened. When we realized there wouldn’t be any aftershocks, everyone went back to business.

All in all it was an eventful day and I’d do it again (the vision study, not the earthquake). In fact they asked me to come back next week to do another three hours of different experiment. I’ll also be doing a sleep study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in September, so we’ll see how that goes. If you want to try a study yourself, here’s the website to check for openings: http://crnet.mgh.harvard.edu/.