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Psych!



Did an experiment for a friend. Got poked and plugged in the brain!! The experiment was very interesting. I had to look at flashing photos of people's faces or houses, six of them arranged in a hexagon. I wasn't actually looking at the photos, instead focusing my attention on a crosshair set at the center of the hexagon. For the first run, five photos were colored yellow, and the sixth was cyan. The sixth photo would either be clear or blurred. My task was to press a button if the photo was blurred. The second run was the same, except the colors reversed---that is I was looking for a blurred yellow on cyan. The electrodes on my head and face picked up microvolt signals that were amplified and recorded on a computer. It's very sensitive! Simply blinking or grinding my teeth considerably altered the voltage scans. If I started to doze, alpha waves could also be recorded.

What was the experiment looking for? Turns out, my friend was delaying the onset of color randomly. I did notice that in the experiment actually. He wanted to see how the delay affects attention.

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