One of the advantages to being in a university town is that you can submit yourself to all kinds of fun experiments. When our first daughter was about 4 weeks old, we brought her in to the IU Psychology department for an experiment to see how she reacted to music. Classical music would be played over speakers, and they tracked her movements both during and after the music stopped. From the reactions of the testers, she did a fantastic job, which is to say that that her movements not only confirmed their thesis, but they confirmed them better than most of their other subjects. Being the competitive parents that we were, especially where music was concerned, we left the building on a huge high. It’s amazing we didn’t take the kids every week.
About three months ago, I saw an ad for another exciting test: they wanted kids who considered themselves “Pokémon Masters”. Even though they are certainly not the usual demographic, given that they are girls, and the whole Pokémon thing went through a couple of years ago, Daughter #1 is a slave to the anime TV show, and Daughter #2 plays a number of the video games on her DS. It’s amazing how much of the culture they have absorbed, given that there are now 649 different species of Pokémon, and they all have different characteristics, and most of them evolve from one another (for example, Bulbasaur evolves first into Ivysaur, and then Venusaur). I could scoff at this, as a “these kids today” kind of thing. But this is not too different from what I did as a kid with collecting baseball cards. My relationship with Pokémon, however, is a subject for another post.
I thought this would be very fun for the kids, and help science along the way. The Wife called up the researchers, and we set up a time. Turns out that they would be having an MRI, and get to take home a CD of images of their brains. We pick them up at school, and drive the 75 minutes down to Bloomington. We turn into the parking lot just in time to hear one of the girls and my favorite new songs: though I can’t remember the name of it now, it did remind me of Party Rock Anthem (which you can easily find on the youtubes), and also this Pokémon parody of the song:
[This was HUGE in our house for a couple of weeks]. Anyway, we were greeted by a very nice woman in her (early) twenties, and let into the the Psychology building, and downstairs to a labyrinthine maze of offices. The girls were both put in a fake MRI enviroment, just to make sure that neither of them were claustrophic, and they simulated the sounds and images that they would see in the real thing. We were let by another woman of about the same age to the real thing, an eight-ton circular magnet. They got to choose what cartoon they were to be shown during the scan: D#1 chose Looney Tunes (turns out it was a good one: Bewitched Bunny), and D#2 chose Wolverine and X-Men.The researchers reassured us that if the MRI picked up anything really abnormal in the brain, that they would send it on to a real doctor, and we would be notified. Wow, free health care in the bargain!
D#1 went first, and once they loaded her in, the Wife and I got to talking with all of the researchers. We were soon interrupted with the question, “Does your daughter have any metal in her skirt?” Even though our kids school uniforms are built to outlast the cockroaches, they need to be mended from time to time, and if someone’s kilt (the proper term) starts ripping apart during the day, the usual procedure is to staple the seam together. It had not occurred to us, while the kids were taking off their metal necklaces, that they still had metal on them. No big deal, the staff member put a blanket over her legs. They also had to replace their normal glasses with special ones made of plastic so they could see the video monitor.
I really couldn’t suss out what the relationship of one to the others, but there was one in her first winter in Bloomington. She was from California, and we tried to give her an idea of what midwestern snow was really like, and how to deal with January and February. While this was happening, D#2 was drawing an anime character of her own on the dry erase board, since she was prohibited from seeing what her sister was seeing: the name turned out to be Xenobia, and she looked to be quite peeved. Then there was a “Dr. Jhon Dee” on his back saying, “Uh oh.” I’m not even going to try to figure out what all of this meant, but before I could ask, her sister came out.
D#2 saw basically what her older sister did, the cartoon, followed by a series of different images, which made little sense to me, but I’m very sure they were important. D#1 was made to take a 15-question test on what appeared to be physics and spatial relations (if Gear A turns this way, which way does Gear D turn?) When D#2 came out, none the worse for wear, she got the same test, and D#1 went on to a “Pokémon master” quiz, which was about 20 questions on all sorts of Poke-things. Since neither girl collects the cards, or has seen Pokémon: The Movie (where Herman Cain got his best lines), some questions they didn’t know at all. There were some supplementary questions on the “ripoff” Digimon world, about which my kids (thankfully, I might say) had no clue. It was also interesting for me from a test-assembly point of view. I learned from the staff that the person who put the test together wasn’t really into Pokémon, she was just using it as a means to an end. From what my kids said, it was obvious that it was difficult for the researcher to figure out what a hard question was, since the whole world was equally obscure to her. For example, the question, “Who is Pokémon #151?” might seem quite difficult (picking one out of 647. It turns out that the answer (Mew) is quite easy to remember for people who are into the game, since it is the last of the First Generation of the game (I realize that this minutiae is fascinating).
When the testing was over, the kids got some gift certificates for their time, a CD of their brain, and we headed out into the cold night. We stopped at the Crazy Horse (a Bloomington standby), the Wife and I picking up gyros, and the kids some normal kid food. Then it was back up north again. The new dog, who was spending his first extended time in the crate, seemed perfectly fine, though he was really happy to frolic in the snow in the backyard when we let him out. So far, he seems up for anything, though his major weakness is squirrels. I was walking him this morning, and it took most of my strength to stop him from racing after one. But if that’s the worst thing he does, we’re lucky.
D#2, as is in her nature, wanted to spend her gift certificate immediately. Which we did today at Target, on a Wii game, Lego Harry Potter, Years 1-4. Given what she had done for science, it seemed just compensation.
