The lab rat

I went to the UC Davis Center for the Mind and Brain this afternoon to be a subject in an experiment designed, the ad said, to assess short-term memory. All subjects had to be older than 60 (I qualify). Turned out, the long-term objective of the study has to do with short-term memory in schizophrenics (age not specified); my cohort is the "control" group.

So I sat in a soundproof room in front of a computer monitor, wearing a set of headphones (through which came the sound of the ocean) and holding a gameboy-type control. My task on the first go-round was to spot the horizontal red oval amongst the varying patterns of vertical red and blue ovals; if the oval was unbroken, I pushed the left button on the console, if it was a broken oval, I pushed the right button. The second go-round switched the colors on me and I had to find the blue horizontal oval and indicate broken or un-. Kinda boring but not difficult, and the pattern stayed on the screen until I made a selection.

Then came the second part of the experiment. Either three or four small squares, each a different color, was flashed on the screen for maybe a hundredth of a second. This would be followed by a second set of colored squares that would remain on the screen until I decided whether the second squares were the same or different than the first ones. Sometimes, the first flash of squares would be followed immediately by multicolored squares, then I'd see the second set. Another part of this section was selecting which square had changed color. This was really, really hard; the trick (if there was one) was not to "look" at anything but instead focus on the little focal point in the center of the screen. I got marginally—only marginally—better at it when I got into a kind of trancelike, nonthinking state, which makes me think that perhaps the real nature of the experiment is to induce schizophrenia . . .

I'll get $15 for this 90 minutes of button-pushing, and when they asked me if I'd be willing to be in their database of potential volunteers for other studies, I said sure; $15 is $15.