I Was a Brain Slave
by Mikita Brottman
A Guinea Pig Zero Web Exclusive!
[The names of all the researchers mentioned in this article have been changed -- The Ed.]
A Guinea Pig Zero Web Exclusive!
[The names of all the researchers mentioned in this article have been changed -- The Ed.]
Before Marlow leaves for Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, his new employers send him to see the corporation doctor in Brussels, presumably to see if he's in fit shape, both physically and psychologically, to make the harrowing journey down the Congo. After taking his pulse, the doctor asks Marlow "with a certain eagerness" if he'd mind having his head measured. Marlow, rather surprised, agrees; the doctor produces a pair of calipers and proceeds to measure various dimensions of his skull, taking careful notes all the while.
"I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there," he said. "And when they come back too?" I asked. "Oh, I never see them," he remarked; "and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know." He smiled, as if at some quiet joke.
This disconcerting physician is a specialist in craniometry, an archaic discipline that involved measuring the cranium in order to compare and classify the characteristics of different individuals and races. I'm always reminded of him whenever I read about psychological tests and measurements: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Adaptive Functioning Index, the Kaufman Assessment Battery. I like charts and graphs, in general: the look of them, the clear lines, the unassailable blocks, the solid colors. There's something especially appealing, I think, in the notion of personality tests. They suggest, in a comforting illusion, that the vague, amorphous flow of impressions and projections we call "personality" can be neatly charted, plotted into the lines of a graph. Mood charts, character inventories, personality indexes: you can fill them in, tally up the results, round them off to a resounding I-told-you-so. Statistics are concrete, definitive, giving the finger to all those unfeeling brutes who told you to get a grip on yourself and pull your socks up. You can't argue with mathematics.
I've always liked the idea of taking some of these psychological tests, so I'm always on the look-out for the opportunity. Most alternative newspapers carry regular notices inviting potential research subjects to volunteer for clinical trials. In Baltimore, where I live, most of them are drug trials at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. The problem for me is that many of these trials involve an inpatient stay, or a series of outpatient visits, which, since I have a full-time job, would involve more time that I can spare. On two occasions, I called to volunteered for one-day studies involving psychedelics, but both times I was excluded during the telephone interview, once because I told them I'd taken psychedelic drugs in the past, and once because I said I was taking an antidepressant medication.
Then one day, in the Baltimore City Paper, I came across an ad containing words to the following effect:
Do any of these apply to you?
If so, said the ad, "you may be eligible to take part in research trials aimed at helping to find a cure for schizophrenia."
I have a few friends but I do like being alone, and I sort of believe in ghosts, and I was between 18 and 45, so I thought I'd probably fit their profile. I also noticed that, unlike the others, this ad didn't mention "compensation," which was a minus in that it I could do with the money, but a plus in that I imagined they wouldn't be overrun with volunteers. Jeanette, the lady I spoke to the phone, asked me a few questions, and said it sounded as though I might qualify for one of their studies. We set a date for the following week, and she gave me directions to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital.
Yes, that's right, Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital. What does that name conjure up to you? To me, it recalls "Green Manors," the verdant Gothic asylum in Hitchcock's Spellbound, where psychoanalysts spend their days in white coats performing brain surgery on pajama-clad paranoids, their evenings writing new volumes on the "guilt complex." And, in fact, there were similarities, at least in the look of the place. Like virtually all other state mental hospitals, Spring Grove was closed down years ago – or at least, most of it was, although, according to its website (www.springgrove.com), it "is now the second oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospital in the United States." Still owned and operated by the State of Maryland, most of the buildings at Spring Grove are now used by offices of the Mental Hygiene Administration, though one of the buildings houses a small residential facility for long-term patients, and another contains an outpatient clinic. As I walked around looking for the Research Center, I noticed a few men in blue shirts whom I assumed were patients, some of them shuffling around, others sitting on a flight of steps smoking cigarettes.
Built in 1797, the hospital must have been a grand old place in its day. I was especially impressed by a large stone building with a classical portico, surrounded, sadly, by construction barriers, yellow tape and wire netting. A dark, looming specter fronted by Roman columns, it looked exactly like you'd imagine a run-down Victorian lunatic asylum to look – bars at the broken windows, a gloomy facade, and a large keystone at the bottom right hand corner carved with the words "Psychopathic Building, 1917." The building was obviously disused and abandoned, and it didn't look as though any rebuilding was going on – the nets and barriers were to catch bits of falling brick and masonry, and to stop people from going in. I was itching to climb over and poke about among the musty rooms (I imagined moldy straitjackets, cages in the cellar, old electroshock machines), but it was broad daylight and there were too many people around.
The Psychiatric Research Center was situated on the first floor of a long plain concrete building, unremarkable apart from the fact that it was built on a sloping hill, so most of the first floor was actually beneath ground. I sat in a waiting room, filled in a pile of consent forms and read through some information about the research trials. If I qualified, it turned out, I'd be taking part in a family study in schizophrenia funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, focusing on "identifying neuropsychological and cognitive markers of schizophrenia liability." The researchers were looking into the differences between people with schizophrenia, and their family members, in comparison with “non-schizophrenic subjects with schizotypal personality styles,” characterized by such attributes, it seemed, as a preference for their own company, a tendency to believe in psychic phenomena, and the habit of seeing ghosts. "Individuals and their family members," it said, "will be asked to participate in clinical interviews, as well as in eye movement and other physiological and neuropsychological testing."
Great, I thought, signing my name on the consent form. Let's get going.
Jeanette, the woman I'd spoken to on the phone, was a gentle, grey-haired social-worker type; for a moment, when she first introduced herself, I thought she was blind, since she was accompanied by a well-behaved black Labrador called Murphy (just as I'd always assumed Roy Orbison was blind because he always wore dark glasses). But no, Murphy was just a pet – or so it first appeared. As I leaned down and give him a scratch between the ears, however, I found myself starting to wonder if he might actually be a specially-trained, intensive psychological testing dog who'd been instructed to sniff out certain kinds of people, perhaps schizophrenics (did you know that schizophrenics actually emit a certain chemical through their sweat ducts, which produces a smell that some psychiatrists can recognize? And if psychiatrists, then why not dogs?). Or maybe all the psychological tests were just to deflect you from the real test, which was how you reacted to Murphy – whether you petted him and made a fuss, or just acted as though he wasn't there. That's the thing about being around psychologists – you start to get paranoid that everything's some sort of test. I hadn't even found out if I even qualified for the research or not, and here I was worrying what they were really up to. But you can't help it. If you've ever been questioned at any length by a psychiatrist, you'll probably know what I mean. You suddenly find yourself in the position of tying to appear normal without making it seem as though you're trying to appear normal.
Jeannette took me upstairs to her office, where she spent an hour or so asking me questions, giving me forms to fill out, and working out my results on a computer. A typical example was the "Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire," to which, as in most psychological tests, you had to answer "yes" or "no" to statements you couldn't possibly answer "yes" or "no" to without further qualification. For example, "People sometimes find it hard to understand what I am saying." My answer to this was "yes," but (I assume) it's because I'm British and (according to my boyfriend) I mumble, not because I'm schizotypal. The same goes for "I sometimes use words in unusual ways." Another was "Have you had experiences with astrology, seeing the future, UFOs, ESP or a sixth sense?" Again, I had to say "yes." I've never had experiences of seeing a UFO, if that's what they were tying to get at, but I once had a friend who was obsessed with alien abductions, so I've been to my fair share of UFO conventions.
Another thing that bothers me about these questionnaires is that, if you answer "yes" to a question like "have you had experiences with the supernatural," it's taken as a possible indication of schizotypal personality, rather than anything else, like the fact that you might actually have had an experience with the supernatural.
After calculating my score on the questionnaire, Jeanette told me I qualified for the family study, which would mean taking brainwave, neuropsych, and eye lab tests. She told me all the tests together would last about eighteen hours; I could take some that afternoon, but I'd have to come back another time to take the rest. She told me I'd be given $11 an hour "as compensation for your time," plus vouchers for lunch, which was currently being served. I wasn't interested in lunch; Jeanette seemed surprised at this, giving me the impression that, for the usual class of research subjects they recruited, free lunch was a pretty big deal.
"Are you sure?" she kept asking me. "There's a cafeteria... it's really not bad at all."
I told her I'd rather go straight to the first test, if that was possible, so she sent me back downstairs to give blood and urine samples in a room that smelled of bananas. The guy who took my blood explained, when I asked, that (i) they needed to take these samples because their ultimate goal was to identify individual genes that led to an increased possibility of developing schizophrenia, and (ii) he'd just had a banana for lunch.
Next, I was introduced to a lady named Joanne, who took me into her office where we spent another hour on yes-or-no type questions. For all my interest in taking tests, I quickly found myself becoming a bit restless, partly because so many of the questions seemed to be the same as those Jeannette had asked me, or very similar, although this time you were at least given a wider choice of responses, to wit: "all the time," "some of the time," "occasionally," "rarely," or "never." For some reason, Joanne felt it necessary to repeat every single one of these options after each statement a very slow, clear voice, as though I might have forgotten them in the five seconds since she'd just said them. It was really annoying. She must have thought I was really stupid – but then, I realized, as far as she was concerned, I might be schizophrenic, or suffer from short-term memory loss, or be otherwise mentally impaired, and she was just trying to be as clear as possible.
There was something hot and musty about the downstairs offices, probably in part because they were situated beneath ground level. Each wall had a couple of small high windows looking out on to the concrete walkway in front of the building, giving you the impression of being in a low basement. The humidity made me start to feel sleepy, and it seemed to be having a similar effect on Joanne, who seemed tired and bored, though doing her best not to show it. I could tell she kept stifling yawns as she went through all the options for the hundredth time, occasionally shaking her head as though she were about to nod off.
After my interview with Joanne, I was sent to sit in the waiting room again, since the "neuropsych tester" was still at lunch. Flicking idly through a dog magazine called The Bark, I found myself imagining the "neuropsych lab" as a modern, sterile room full of hi-tech CAT scan machines, in which a handsome white-coated neuroscientist would delicately probe my brain with some fabulously expensive equipment, making me suddenly notice the smell of strawberries, or the taste of freshly baked bread, or remember being born. Instead, a tall, curly-haired girl in jeans led me into another musty-smelling basement office whose floor was piled with what seemed to be old toys and board games from the 1950s. These, it turns out, were the “neuropsych tests.”
Laura, the curly-haired girl, introduced herself as a research associate in the program, and proceeded to lead me through a painful obstacle course of memory tests, one after another, for what seemed like hours and hours, until I was hardly able to remember my own name. For the first time in my life, even though my the rest of my body was antsy, my brain actually felt tired – not sluggish or slow, but tired, the way a muscle feels tired, the way your upper arms feel after a set of push-ups.
Right from the start, I was surprised how competitive I felt, especially since I knew I'd never see the results. For some reason, it felt very important for me to be in the highest percentile, even though, as I kept reminding myself, I was competing against schizophrenics, psychics, loners, and people who believe in ghosts. I still wanted to be the best. Of all the psychics, loners, and ghost-botherers, I wanted to be one of the smartest.
The first tests were like the kind of game you play as a kid on a long car journey, involving things like saying as many nouns (“object words,” Laura called them) as you could think of that began with a given letter. Laura reassured me it was a pure test of memory, the words themselves being irrelevant, which came as quite a relief considering the grotesque, outlandish, and filthy string of nonsense I heard coming out of my own mouth under the pressure of the clock -- my "w" words, I recall, included "wanker," "werewolf," "wombat," and "wassail" (Laura had to ask me what "wassail" meant, though she seemed familiar enough with “wanker”). Then there were a series of tests involving categories, in which I had to name all the animals I could think of, then all the fruits, then the vegetables. In this latter test I learned, from Laura's confusion, that a "marrow" is what Americans call a "squash." Actually, it was surprising how much colloquial English vocabulary I came out with, given I'd been living in the U.S. for the last seven years. There were tests where you had to remember and repeat little stories full of details, names and figures, tests where you had to repeat lists of words, both forwards and backwards, tests which involved repeating sentences that were interrupted by other sentences, tests in which you had to decide which symbol followed next in a sequence, and many more that I've since forgotten.
One of the tests stood out because it was a test of something other than memory; in fact, as Laura explained to me, it was a sort of empathy quiz, designed to highlight autism spectrum disorders. In this test, she told me, she'd play tape recordings of short stories that I could follow in print, and then I'd be asked certain questions about what happened in them.
We sat and listened to the stories, which reminded me of French comprehension exams at school, only these stories were far more simple. They all contained a situation in which someone said or did something "they shouldn't have," and you had to say what it was. For example, John and Mary have planned a surprise party for Jane's birthday. Jane and Mary are shopping, and Mary spots a dress she likes.
"Good! I can wear that dress for the party on Friday," she says.
"What party?" says Jane.
"Now let’s go and buy some socks," says Mary.
Another one involved a customer in a restaurant who asks another customer to bring him his check. "Why did William ask Peter for his check?" they asked.
Obviously, the "right answer" is the William mistook Peter for the waiter, and this is the answer I gave, but not without swallowing a tight lump of indignation. What I REALLY wanted to say was: How the bloody hell should I know? How could anyone know, without knowing William and Peter, and what they were like? Maybe, for some reason, Peter was dressed like a waiter. Maybe William was having a psychotic episode. Maybe William wanted to piss Peter off, or pick him up, or get a better look at him, or any one of a million reasons. We don't know our own motives half the time; how can we be expected understand those of strangers?
It was also odd to see everybody being called John and Peter and Mary – not very politically correct, in this day and age. Even in our French comprehension tests, there was an occasional Rashid or Fatima or Mustafa, and that was twenty years ago.
But I kept my objections to myself. After all, it wasn't Laura's fault – she didn't design the tests, and I got the sense she'd probably have agreed with me. She was very open. She liked people, she told me. When I admired a ring she was wearing, she took it off her finger to show me the Hebrew inscription inside, telling me how it had been a gift from her father to her mother the year she was born. She also smoked, and, half way through the tests, said she was going to take a cigarette break. She asked me if I wanted to go with her, but I felt like I needed a few minutes to myself. Before she went, Laura gave me eighty cents in change from an envelope to get myself a snack from the machine.
"The snacks are forty cents each, so you can get two," she said, generously.
Not all the snacks were forty cents each, though. Peter Paul Mounds bars and Reese's Pieces, which were the snacks I chose, were actually thirty five cents each. I had ten cents left over, which made me start to feel paranoid again. Should I give Laura the ten cents, or should I keep it? Was this part of the test? WAS this the test? Was there a secret device in the snack machine that told them what snacks you'd bought? Were they all waiting behind a one-way mirror, including Murphy, to see which snacks I chose, how fast I ate them, and what I did with the change?
Once you start thinking like that, you have to stop while you still can.
The first test we did after the break was another odd one. Laura said she was going to show me a series of faces, and I had to say "pleasant" or "unpleasant," according to my first impression. She then took out a flip-book of black and white photos. The faces were all male, and all white. From their shirt collars and hairstyles, I got the impression the test had been developed some time in the 1950s. The men were both young and old; a lot of them wore ties; some were wearing awful shirts with enormous lapels. Some were bald or losing their hair; some had hooked or bulbous noses; others had huge, bulging eyes. At first, I didn't find any of them "pleasant," but after seeing some of those hideous mugs, my standards rapidly lowered, and I started saying "pleasant" to any face that didn't actually make me flinch.
"That's quite a collection of faces," I remarked, after we'd finished.
"Oh my god, I know," laughed Laura. "Some of them are just unbelievable. At first, when they showed us this test, I thought, 'They're so ugly! I'm never going to be able to give that test without cracking up.' At first it was really hard, but I'm used to it now, it doesn't bother me. Still, some people have quite a reaction to a couple of them. There's one – which is it now? I'll show you." She picked up the book and started flipping through the pictures. "Here it is, this one." She showed me a picture of a man with a misshaped head, huge uni-brow, and evil, staring eyes, a face that hadn't particularly stood out among all the others, but now looked especially disturbing. "This one woman, when she saw that face, she had to cover her eyes," said Laura. "She said ‘Oh my god, take him away, I can't look at him.' She said he looked like a serial killer."
"Why are they all men? And why are they so ugly?"
"They're not supposed to be ugly, they're just supposed to be a selection of ordinary faces. We're going to come back to this test later. You're supposed to be able to remember some of them more clearly than others. I don't know why they're all men. A lot of guys say to me, 'Now if there were some women in there, I might be able to remember some of them.' I think it's just a really old test."
"Why don't they make a new one?"
"Probably because they've got all the previous data using this one," she said. "They need to compare new data with data going back to when they first started doing these tests, so they have a standard to compare it with. Research into schizophrenia is really difficult, and the data is pretty limited, so they've got to use anything they've got."
Other tasks I had to do included: telling the story of Cinderella into a tape recorder, explaining (briefly) why people believe in God, repeating a number of digits in both forward and reverse order, defining a series of increasingly difficult words, placing nouns in categories, tracing lines on a piece of paper with my finger, and touching a sequence of pegs on a board.
At first, I was disappointed that I'd never know how well I did. Part of my interest in psychological tests, I was starting to realize, was to know how well my brain stood up against others. The only time I ever got a sense of this was when, during one test, we needed to go on to a third file, which Laura had trouble finding because, she commented, "people hardly ever get past the second file." But as the afternoon grew on, as I grew more tired and the tests seemed increasingly difficult, my frustration at not learning how I'd done gradually started to feel more like relief.
It was grueling. Even Laura started to make mistakes. During the peg board test, for example, she'd touch the pegs in a certain order which I then had to then imitate, first just as she'd done, then in reverse order. This involved us both concentrating ferociously over the peg board. Laura would glance down occasionally to look at the instructions in her lap, and at one point, she apparently made a mistake, which she retracted immediately.
"Whoa. Forget that," she said, and quickly waved a hand in front of my eyes in a sudden, odd, movement, a sort of quick wiping wave from side to side, like the magic gesture of a tribal shaman, or a stage hypnotist bringing you out of a trance. It worked, too – I immediately forgot the mistaken sequence.
Around six in the evening, we got to the final test -- one in which, Laura told me, I could “actually win money, up to five dollars.” It was separate from the schizophrenia study, she told me. They were trying to find out whether the possibility of earning small sums of money was an incentive to faster learning. A sequence of symbols would appear on a computer screen, and you had to work out the order of the sequence by clicking the mouse on the symbol you thought would come next. If you got it right, a bell rang and a congratulatory sign flashed on the screen telling you that you'd won ten cents. If you got it wrong, a sad-clown buzzer noise announced you'd lost ten cents. It went on and on, and it was infuriating because it went too fast for you to really be able to work out the sequence. Every time I thought I'd definitely worked it out, after the bell rung again and again, suddenly the sad-clown buzzer would go off, mocking my confidence. After a while, I decided it must be a trick of some kind, that there was no connection. I started pressing symbols at random. This had me on a winning streak for a while, but soon even this proved false, when I started to lose again. It was like gambling when you don't know what game you're playing, and you can't slow down to find out. At the end of the test, I'd won two dollars and thirty cents.
"Not bad," said Laura, counting out my change.
"Well, what was it?" I asked.
"What was what?"
"The connection."
"Oh, I'm sorry. We can't tell you that." she said.
I wanted to hit her.
I was supposed to go back to Spring Grove the following week for the rest of the tests, but to be honest, I was in two minds about it. The first day had been really tiring, and the tests had been disappointingly boring. The only thing still held interest for me was the phrase "Brainwave Tests." I really wanted to have my brainwaves tested. I wanted to wear a metal helmet with lots of wires sticking out of it. I wanted to see the pattern of my brainwaves on a plasma screen. I could learn a lot about myself, I thought, from seeing my brainwaves.
The brainwave lab was located in what used to be one of the worker's cottages when Spring Grove was a fully-functioning asylum, and if you think the words "cottage" and "brainwave lab" make an uneasy pairing, you'd be right. I don't think I've ever seen a place that looked less like a laboratory than this small, single room consisting of a chamber about the size of a large phone booth, and a desk containing one or two computer terminals, a printer and some other equipment. Sitting at this desk was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Margaret and invited me to take a seat. Margaret was the brainwave researcher, and, as she told me what the "P50" would involve, Ruth squeezed behind me and started to attach electrodes to my scalp. The electrodes were covered it in a greasy lubricant, which Ruth explained was to help conduct the electricity. I was sitting on a wooden stool and Ruth could just about fit in the space behind me. There was very little room to maneuver. It all seemed so amateurish, like I was about to be given a lobotomy by a couple of kids playing in their dad's toolshed.
Sticking the electrodes to my head took a long time. Outside, in the hospital grounds, somebody was moving the lawn. It was a hot day in the middle of June.
Margaret explained that she'd be watching my brainwaves on a screen in front of her, measuring my responses while I listened to a series of tones. The point of the study, she said, was to identify brain regions that might be involved in schizophrenia.
I felt sure my brainwaves would look different from other people's. My brain HAD to be special.
"If you saw anything unusual, would you tell me?" I asked.
Margaret gave me a very patient, practiced look and began a speech she'd obviously given many times before.
"You have to understand," she explained, slowly. "I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a researcher. The tests we're giving you are to collect data for a series of research experiments. We won't be giving you the results of these tests. They're not those kinds of tests, they're control experiments. However, if you think there might be something wrong with your brain – if you've had a fall, a blow to the head, or anything like that – then you need to go and talk to your G.P."
In other words, I was irrelevant. Even as a brain, I was relevant only as a control test. They weren't interested in me, they were interested in data.
I felt very small.
Ruth led me into the cubicle, which was blacked out on the inside, the one window hung with a black curtain. It contained a wooden chair and a small desk with a cracked and peeling top. I sat down on the chair which swayed backwards dangerously. On the desk was a very old computer screen propped up with a copy of the 1987 Physician's Desk Reference Manual. Loose wires stuck out of the wall and trailed along floor. Ruth handed me a set of earphones, then connected the wires coming from to my head with another set of wires sticking out of the wall and wound scotch tape around the dodgy-looking connection. She explained that I should press a buzzer when I heard a tone in my earphones. "The most important thing," she said as she closed the curtain and turned out the light, "is to you keep your eyes open. We don't want you falling asleep."
I smiled. Fall asleep? I'd show them. My brain was active, fired up, ready to go. I wasn't one of those drooling schizophrenics with sluggish brainwaves. My brainwaves would cause a sensation.
The first tones started in my ears, and I pressed the buzzer just as I'd been instructed. The next thing I knew, Ruth was hammering her fist on the glass window of the booth.
"Open your eyes!" she yelled. "You're sleeping!"
I couldn't believe I'd been asleep, and tried to argue with them, but Margaret actually pointed to the evidence on the graph of my dozing brainwaves.
The problem was, it was so nice and warm and dark in the booth and the tests were so terribly boring. Margaret explained to me later that they were testing "sensory gating" or "pre-pulse inhibition" -– that is, the capacity to inhibit your response to a noise that you hear more than once. The first time you hear an unfamiliar noise, naturally, you're going to react, but when you hear it for a second or third time, the brain "gates it out," since by now it knows the noise is just a background distraction. Apparently, for some reason, schizophrenics don't seem to have this "gating" ability, so they'll respond to all noises with equal attention, unable to block out the ones the rest of us know are just harmless background sounds.
When we'd finished the tests, Margaret was kind enough to show me my brainwaves on her computer screen while Ruth was taking the electrodes out of my hair. Margaret said I had a pretty good reaction time on my "P50." She even showed me a comparison between my "P50" and that of a schizophrenic, but to tell the truth, I couldn't tell the difference. In fact, I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be looking at.
Once she'd removed the electrodes, Ruth showed me a bathroom and said, if I wanted to, I could wash my hair in the sink. She said they had a hair dryer, and although there was no shampoo, the soap in the dispenser worked pretty well. I washed all the greasy lubricant out of my hair and went back into the "lab," where Ruth offered me the choice of a red, blue, or green plastic comb and showed me a hair dryer, but she said I could only use it in the "lab" because there weren't any electrical sockets in the bathroom. I dried my hair while Ruth and Margaret cleaned down the table top. Before I left, Margaret offered me a lunch voucher, and, as with Jeanette before, was shocked when I said I didn't want lunch. Saying I didn't want lunch caused a far greater sensation than my brainwaves.
Who were these odd people, I wondered, to whom lunch was such a big deal?
Disillusioned and rather weary, I retraced my steps to the original building for my final series of tests. I thought about going home, but I told myself it was nearly over now, and I ought to stick it out long enough to pick up my full pay check, which I'd figured out would be around $200. Back in the waiting room, Jeanette said she wanted to get some video tape of my body movements while we were waiting for the eye lab technician to get back from lunch. I followed her and Murphy into another musty basement room, this one with no windows, where a video camera was set up and pointed at a chair. At the other end of the room was a long rack of dirty blue smocks and white coats waiting to be taken to the laundry. Jeanette picked up the camera, gave me a set of directions and filmed me as I did what she asked, which included things like “walk in a circle," "walk in a straight line," "lift your hands above your head," and "wave your hands in the air." With the hand movements, she demonstrated what she wanted me to do, which made things slightly better – at least we both looked totally ridiculous – but it reminded me of a game of Simon Says, or a police DWI test, and I was glad when it was over.
The final tests, which took place in the "eye lab" were the most arduous of the lot. They combined the worst elements of all the previous experiments – they were dull, endlessly tiring, and physically painful. The guy in the lab explained to me that people with schizophrenia often move their eyes differently than everybody else, in that their eyeballs tended to jump from side to side instead of gliding smoothly -- subtle but characteristic movements known as "saccades" that can only be observed, he explained, with the use of computer eye-tracking equipment. He told me they'd developed new, non-invasive, state-of-the-art instruments to evaluate people's eye movements and eye-blink conditioning.
Imagine a hot, dark dungeon constructed by a sadistic optician. Now imagine sitting for hours on a metal chair in this dungeon with your chin on a shelf, as though you're being tested for glasses, except that on your head is a big heavy eye mask with wires coming out of it on both sides. Through the mask's two pinholes, you have to follow the movements of little dots on a computer screen. It reminded me of the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange – that's how "non-invasive" it was.
Only, I wasn't watching anything nearly as interesting as scenes of violence and mayhem. I was watching dots flashing on a screen. For hours. Sometimes, after the dot had flashed on and off, I'd have to follow its progress across the screen with my eyes. Sometimes I'd have to look at a different dot with each eye; in one experiment I had to look at the place the dot was before it disappeared; in another, I'd have to look at the equivalent place on the opposite side of the screen. In the second series of tests, after a short break, I had to name the color of letters spelling out different colors (like the word "blue" in yellow letters, which wasn't as easy as it sounds), or discern the number hidden in a pattern of dots, or press a buzzer every time I saw the number eight, with the screenshots getting faster and faster all the time, until my head ached, my eyes were crossed, everything was just a big blur. I was going literally dotty.
The worst part of all was that, except for during the eye-blink test, I wasn't supposed to blink. And of course, as soon as I knew I couldn't blink, I started thinking about blinking, and really wanting to blink. Before long, I started to feel real strain in my eyeballs, making me highly aware for the first time that the eye is, in fact, like the brain, a muscle, and my eye muscles needed a rest. So did my head. I kept myself going by thinking about what it would feel like to get home. I imagined driving home, lying down on my bed in a nice, cool room, and rubbing my eyes with my fists as hard as I could for ages. Bliss.
Finally, I was released from the dungeon. The only things left for me to do was fill in some payment forms and get my finger and palm prints taken. My eyes were so tired that I'd stopped paying attention to my surroundings, but in the room where they took my fingerprints, I couldn't help noticing some rather inappropriately "comical" posters on the wall saying things like "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps."
What disappointed me the most about the two days I spent as a "psychological" guinea pig wasn't the run-down, low-tech nature of the tests and facilities -- though this was a disappointment, to be sure -- but the fact that it wasn't "psychological" at all. The recruitment ad had been so intriguing, with its talk of ghosts and psychic experiences, that I found it hard to believe there wasn't going to be any real interviews or discussions – let alone Ouija boards or mind-reading experiments -- and all I was going to be doing was pressing a buzzer when a dot flashed on a screen. I kept expecting something more. I suppose, naively enough, I was assuming that at some point, somebody would express an interest in who I was – my character, personality, beliefs, experiences and ideas. Granted, I'm not a genius or a psychic; perhaps I'm not particularly unusual or interesting – I'm probably not even on the spectrum of schizotypal personalities -- but, since these were supposed to be psychological tests, I'd imagined someone, somewhere during the eighteen hours would express at least some kind of engagement or curiosity about who I was. I gradually come to realize, however, that I was far more interested in the tests and the people giving them than they were in me.
This may have been partly due to how the research was divided. Since I did a different series of tests with each researcher, it felt rather like being on a factory production line. And to a factory worker, I imagine the items on the conveyer belt are all alike. After all, Joanne told me I was one of over 700 volunteer subjects they'd tested, not counting the schizophrenics and their families. All that was needed from me, essentially, was good data, data that would fit the pattern of their control group without distorting the averages. Of course, this is what guinea pigs are for – but since these were psychological experiments, I'd hoped that the researchers would be more interested in my mind than my brain. In the end, however, I realized that, like most other employees, what they were mainly interested in was what they'd be doing when they got out of work at five.
"I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there," he said. "And when they come back too?" I asked. "Oh, I never see them," he remarked; "and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know." He smiled, as if at some quiet joke.
This disconcerting physician is a specialist in craniometry, an archaic discipline that involved measuring the cranium in order to compare and classify the characteristics of different individuals and races. I'm always reminded of him whenever I read about psychological tests and measurements: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Adaptive Functioning Index, the Kaufman Assessment Battery. I like charts and graphs, in general: the look of them, the clear lines, the unassailable blocks, the solid colors. There's something especially appealing, I think, in the notion of personality tests. They suggest, in a comforting illusion, that the vague, amorphous flow of impressions and projections we call "personality" can be neatly charted, plotted into the lines of a graph. Mood charts, character inventories, personality indexes: you can fill them in, tally up the results, round them off to a resounding I-told-you-so. Statistics are concrete, definitive, giving the finger to all those unfeeling brutes who told you to get a grip on yourself and pull your socks up. You can't argue with mathematics.
I've always liked the idea of taking some of these psychological tests, so I'm always on the look-out for the opportunity. Most alternative newspapers carry regular notices inviting potential research subjects to volunteer for clinical trials. In Baltimore, where I live, most of them are drug trials at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. The problem for me is that many of these trials involve an inpatient stay, or a series of outpatient visits, which, since I have a full-time job, would involve more time that I can spare. On two occasions, I called to volunteered for one-day studies involving psychedelics, but both times I was excluded during the telephone interview, once because I told them I'd taken psychedelic drugs in the past, and once because I said I was taking an antidepressant medication.
Then one day, in the Baltimore City Paper, I came across an ad containing words to the following effect:
Do any of these apply to you?
- You are between the ages of 18 and 45.
- You have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, or are a family member of someone who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
- You don't have many friends, or you prefer to be alone.
- You frequently have psychic experiences.
- You believe in ghosts.
If so, said the ad, "you may be eligible to take part in research trials aimed at helping to find a cure for schizophrenia."
I have a few friends but I do like being alone, and I sort of believe in ghosts, and I was between 18 and 45, so I thought I'd probably fit their profile. I also noticed that, unlike the others, this ad didn't mention "compensation," which was a minus in that it I could do with the money, but a plus in that I imagined they wouldn't be overrun with volunteers. Jeanette, the lady I spoke to the phone, asked me a few questions, and said it sounded as though I might qualify for one of their studies. We set a date for the following week, and she gave me directions to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital.
Yes, that's right, Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital. What does that name conjure up to you? To me, it recalls "Green Manors," the verdant Gothic asylum in Hitchcock's Spellbound, where psychoanalysts spend their days in white coats performing brain surgery on pajama-clad paranoids, their evenings writing new volumes on the "guilt complex." And, in fact, there were similarities, at least in the look of the place. Like virtually all other state mental hospitals, Spring Grove was closed down years ago – or at least, most of it was, although, according to its website (www.springgrove.com), it "is now the second oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospital in the United States." Still owned and operated by the State of Maryland, most of the buildings at Spring Grove are now used by offices of the Mental Hygiene Administration, though one of the buildings houses a small residential facility for long-term patients, and another contains an outpatient clinic. As I walked around looking for the Research Center, I noticed a few men in blue shirts whom I assumed were patients, some of them shuffling around, others sitting on a flight of steps smoking cigarettes.
Built in 1797, the hospital must have been a grand old place in its day. I was especially impressed by a large stone building with a classical portico, surrounded, sadly, by construction barriers, yellow tape and wire netting. A dark, looming specter fronted by Roman columns, it looked exactly like you'd imagine a run-down Victorian lunatic asylum to look – bars at the broken windows, a gloomy facade, and a large keystone at the bottom right hand corner carved with the words "Psychopathic Building, 1917." The building was obviously disused and abandoned, and it didn't look as though any rebuilding was going on – the nets and barriers were to catch bits of falling brick and masonry, and to stop people from going in. I was itching to climb over and poke about among the musty rooms (I imagined moldy straitjackets, cages in the cellar, old electroshock machines), but it was broad daylight and there were too many people around.
The Psychiatric Research Center was situated on the first floor of a long plain concrete building, unremarkable apart from the fact that it was built on a sloping hill, so most of the first floor was actually beneath ground. I sat in a waiting room, filled in a pile of consent forms and read through some information about the research trials. If I qualified, it turned out, I'd be taking part in a family study in schizophrenia funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, focusing on "identifying neuropsychological and cognitive markers of schizophrenia liability." The researchers were looking into the differences between people with schizophrenia, and their family members, in comparison with “non-schizophrenic subjects with schizotypal personality styles,” characterized by such attributes, it seemed, as a preference for their own company, a tendency to believe in psychic phenomena, and the habit of seeing ghosts. "Individuals and their family members," it said, "will be asked to participate in clinical interviews, as well as in eye movement and other physiological and neuropsychological testing."
Great, I thought, signing my name on the consent form. Let's get going.
Jeanette, the woman I'd spoken to on the phone, was a gentle, grey-haired social-worker type; for a moment, when she first introduced herself, I thought she was blind, since she was accompanied by a well-behaved black Labrador called Murphy (just as I'd always assumed Roy Orbison was blind because he always wore dark glasses). But no, Murphy was just a pet – or so it first appeared. As I leaned down and give him a scratch between the ears, however, I found myself starting to wonder if he might actually be a specially-trained, intensive psychological testing dog who'd been instructed to sniff out certain kinds of people, perhaps schizophrenics (did you know that schizophrenics actually emit a certain chemical through their sweat ducts, which produces a smell that some psychiatrists can recognize? And if psychiatrists, then why not dogs?). Or maybe all the psychological tests were just to deflect you from the real test, which was how you reacted to Murphy – whether you petted him and made a fuss, or just acted as though he wasn't there. That's the thing about being around psychologists – you start to get paranoid that everything's some sort of test. I hadn't even found out if I even qualified for the research or not, and here I was worrying what they were really up to. But you can't help it. If you've ever been questioned at any length by a psychiatrist, you'll probably know what I mean. You suddenly find yourself in the position of tying to appear normal without making it seem as though you're trying to appear normal.
Jeannette took me upstairs to her office, where she spent an hour or so asking me questions, giving me forms to fill out, and working out my results on a computer. A typical example was the "Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire," to which, as in most psychological tests, you had to answer "yes" or "no" to statements you couldn't possibly answer "yes" or "no" to without further qualification. For example, "People sometimes find it hard to understand what I am saying." My answer to this was "yes," but (I assume) it's because I'm British and (according to my boyfriend) I mumble, not because I'm schizotypal. The same goes for "I sometimes use words in unusual ways." Another was "Have you had experiences with astrology, seeing the future, UFOs, ESP or a sixth sense?" Again, I had to say "yes." I've never had experiences of seeing a UFO, if that's what they were tying to get at, but I once had a friend who was obsessed with alien abductions, so I've been to my fair share of UFO conventions.
Another thing that bothers me about these questionnaires is that, if you answer "yes" to a question like "have you had experiences with the supernatural," it's taken as a possible indication of schizotypal personality, rather than anything else, like the fact that you might actually have had an experience with the supernatural.
After calculating my score on the questionnaire, Jeanette told me I qualified for the family study, which would mean taking brainwave, neuropsych, and eye lab tests. She told me all the tests together would last about eighteen hours; I could take some that afternoon, but I'd have to come back another time to take the rest. She told me I'd be given $11 an hour "as compensation for your time," plus vouchers for lunch, which was currently being served. I wasn't interested in lunch; Jeanette seemed surprised at this, giving me the impression that, for the usual class of research subjects they recruited, free lunch was a pretty big deal.
"Are you sure?" she kept asking me. "There's a cafeteria... it's really not bad at all."
I told her I'd rather go straight to the first test, if that was possible, so she sent me back downstairs to give blood and urine samples in a room that smelled of bananas. The guy who took my blood explained, when I asked, that (i) they needed to take these samples because their ultimate goal was to identify individual genes that led to an increased possibility of developing schizophrenia, and (ii) he'd just had a banana for lunch.
Next, I was introduced to a lady named Joanne, who took me into her office where we spent another hour on yes-or-no type questions. For all my interest in taking tests, I quickly found myself becoming a bit restless, partly because so many of the questions seemed to be the same as those Jeannette had asked me, or very similar, although this time you were at least given a wider choice of responses, to wit: "all the time," "some of the time," "occasionally," "rarely," or "never." For some reason, Joanne felt it necessary to repeat every single one of these options after each statement a very slow, clear voice, as though I might have forgotten them in the five seconds since she'd just said them. It was really annoying. She must have thought I was really stupid – but then, I realized, as far as she was concerned, I might be schizophrenic, or suffer from short-term memory loss, or be otherwise mentally impaired, and she was just trying to be as clear as possible.
There was something hot and musty about the downstairs offices, probably in part because they were situated beneath ground level. Each wall had a couple of small high windows looking out on to the concrete walkway in front of the building, giving you the impression of being in a low basement. The humidity made me start to feel sleepy, and it seemed to be having a similar effect on Joanne, who seemed tired and bored, though doing her best not to show it. I could tell she kept stifling yawns as she went through all the options for the hundredth time, occasionally shaking her head as though she were about to nod off.
After my interview with Joanne, I was sent to sit in the waiting room again, since the "neuropsych tester" was still at lunch. Flicking idly through a dog magazine called The Bark, I found myself imagining the "neuropsych lab" as a modern, sterile room full of hi-tech CAT scan machines, in which a handsome white-coated neuroscientist would delicately probe my brain with some fabulously expensive equipment, making me suddenly notice the smell of strawberries, or the taste of freshly baked bread, or remember being born. Instead, a tall, curly-haired girl in jeans led me into another musty-smelling basement office whose floor was piled with what seemed to be old toys and board games from the 1950s. These, it turns out, were the “neuropsych tests.”
Laura, the curly-haired girl, introduced herself as a research associate in the program, and proceeded to lead me through a painful obstacle course of memory tests, one after another, for what seemed like hours and hours, until I was hardly able to remember my own name. For the first time in my life, even though my the rest of my body was antsy, my brain actually felt tired – not sluggish or slow, but tired, the way a muscle feels tired, the way your upper arms feel after a set of push-ups.
Right from the start, I was surprised how competitive I felt, especially since I knew I'd never see the results. For some reason, it felt very important for me to be in the highest percentile, even though, as I kept reminding myself, I was competing against schizophrenics, psychics, loners, and people who believe in ghosts. I still wanted to be the best. Of all the psychics, loners, and ghost-botherers, I wanted to be one of the smartest.
The first tests were like the kind of game you play as a kid on a long car journey, involving things like saying as many nouns (“object words,” Laura called them) as you could think of that began with a given letter. Laura reassured me it was a pure test of memory, the words themselves being irrelevant, which came as quite a relief considering the grotesque, outlandish, and filthy string of nonsense I heard coming out of my own mouth under the pressure of the clock -- my "w" words, I recall, included "wanker," "werewolf," "wombat," and "wassail" (Laura had to ask me what "wassail" meant, though she seemed familiar enough with “wanker”). Then there were a series of tests involving categories, in which I had to name all the animals I could think of, then all the fruits, then the vegetables. In this latter test I learned, from Laura's confusion, that a "marrow" is what Americans call a "squash." Actually, it was surprising how much colloquial English vocabulary I came out with, given I'd been living in the U.S. for the last seven years. There were tests where you had to remember and repeat little stories full of details, names and figures, tests where you had to repeat lists of words, both forwards and backwards, tests which involved repeating sentences that were interrupted by other sentences, tests in which you had to decide which symbol followed next in a sequence, and many more that I've since forgotten.
One of the tests stood out because it was a test of something other than memory; in fact, as Laura explained to me, it was a sort of empathy quiz, designed to highlight autism spectrum disorders. In this test, she told me, she'd play tape recordings of short stories that I could follow in print, and then I'd be asked certain questions about what happened in them.
We sat and listened to the stories, which reminded me of French comprehension exams at school, only these stories were far more simple. They all contained a situation in which someone said or did something "they shouldn't have," and you had to say what it was. For example, John and Mary have planned a surprise party for Jane's birthday. Jane and Mary are shopping, and Mary spots a dress she likes.
"Good! I can wear that dress for the party on Friday," she says.
"What party?" says Jane.
"Now let’s go and buy some socks," says Mary.
Another one involved a customer in a restaurant who asks another customer to bring him his check. "Why did William ask Peter for his check?" they asked.
Obviously, the "right answer" is the William mistook Peter for the waiter, and this is the answer I gave, but not without swallowing a tight lump of indignation. What I REALLY wanted to say was: How the bloody hell should I know? How could anyone know, without knowing William and Peter, and what they were like? Maybe, for some reason, Peter was dressed like a waiter. Maybe William was having a psychotic episode. Maybe William wanted to piss Peter off, or pick him up, or get a better look at him, or any one of a million reasons. We don't know our own motives half the time; how can we be expected understand those of strangers?
It was also odd to see everybody being called John and Peter and Mary – not very politically correct, in this day and age. Even in our French comprehension tests, there was an occasional Rashid or Fatima or Mustafa, and that was twenty years ago.
But I kept my objections to myself. After all, it wasn't Laura's fault – she didn't design the tests, and I got the sense she'd probably have agreed with me. She was very open. She liked people, she told me. When I admired a ring she was wearing, she took it off her finger to show me the Hebrew inscription inside, telling me how it had been a gift from her father to her mother the year she was born. She also smoked, and, half way through the tests, said she was going to take a cigarette break. She asked me if I wanted to go with her, but I felt like I needed a few minutes to myself. Before she went, Laura gave me eighty cents in change from an envelope to get myself a snack from the machine.
"The snacks are forty cents each, so you can get two," she said, generously.
Not all the snacks were forty cents each, though. Peter Paul Mounds bars and Reese's Pieces, which were the snacks I chose, were actually thirty five cents each. I had ten cents left over, which made me start to feel paranoid again. Should I give Laura the ten cents, or should I keep it? Was this part of the test? WAS this the test? Was there a secret device in the snack machine that told them what snacks you'd bought? Were they all waiting behind a one-way mirror, including Murphy, to see which snacks I chose, how fast I ate them, and what I did with the change?
Once you start thinking like that, you have to stop while you still can.
The first test we did after the break was another odd one. Laura said she was going to show me a series of faces, and I had to say "pleasant" or "unpleasant," according to my first impression. She then took out a flip-book of black and white photos. The faces were all male, and all white. From their shirt collars and hairstyles, I got the impression the test had been developed some time in the 1950s. The men were both young and old; a lot of them wore ties; some were wearing awful shirts with enormous lapels. Some were bald or losing their hair; some had hooked or bulbous noses; others had huge, bulging eyes. At first, I didn't find any of them "pleasant," but after seeing some of those hideous mugs, my standards rapidly lowered, and I started saying "pleasant" to any face that didn't actually make me flinch.
"That's quite a collection of faces," I remarked, after we'd finished.
"Oh my god, I know," laughed Laura. "Some of them are just unbelievable. At first, when they showed us this test, I thought, 'They're so ugly! I'm never going to be able to give that test without cracking up.' At first it was really hard, but I'm used to it now, it doesn't bother me. Still, some people have quite a reaction to a couple of them. There's one – which is it now? I'll show you." She picked up the book and started flipping through the pictures. "Here it is, this one." She showed me a picture of a man with a misshaped head, huge uni-brow, and evil, staring eyes, a face that hadn't particularly stood out among all the others, but now looked especially disturbing. "This one woman, when she saw that face, she had to cover her eyes," said Laura. "She said ‘Oh my god, take him away, I can't look at him.' She said he looked like a serial killer."
"Why are they all men? And why are they so ugly?"
"They're not supposed to be ugly, they're just supposed to be a selection of ordinary faces. We're going to come back to this test later. You're supposed to be able to remember some of them more clearly than others. I don't know why they're all men. A lot of guys say to me, 'Now if there were some women in there, I might be able to remember some of them.' I think it's just a really old test."
"Why don't they make a new one?"
"Probably because they've got all the previous data using this one," she said. "They need to compare new data with data going back to when they first started doing these tests, so they have a standard to compare it with. Research into schizophrenia is really difficult, and the data is pretty limited, so they've got to use anything they've got."
Other tasks I had to do included: telling the story of Cinderella into a tape recorder, explaining (briefly) why people believe in God, repeating a number of digits in both forward and reverse order, defining a series of increasingly difficult words, placing nouns in categories, tracing lines on a piece of paper with my finger, and touching a sequence of pegs on a board.
At first, I was disappointed that I'd never know how well I did. Part of my interest in psychological tests, I was starting to realize, was to know how well my brain stood up against others. The only time I ever got a sense of this was when, during one test, we needed to go on to a third file, which Laura had trouble finding because, she commented, "people hardly ever get past the second file." But as the afternoon grew on, as I grew more tired and the tests seemed increasingly difficult, my frustration at not learning how I'd done gradually started to feel more like relief.
It was grueling. Even Laura started to make mistakes. During the peg board test, for example, she'd touch the pegs in a certain order which I then had to then imitate, first just as she'd done, then in reverse order. This involved us both concentrating ferociously over the peg board. Laura would glance down occasionally to look at the instructions in her lap, and at one point, she apparently made a mistake, which she retracted immediately.
"Whoa. Forget that," she said, and quickly waved a hand in front of my eyes in a sudden, odd, movement, a sort of quick wiping wave from side to side, like the magic gesture of a tribal shaman, or a stage hypnotist bringing you out of a trance. It worked, too – I immediately forgot the mistaken sequence.
Around six in the evening, we got to the final test -- one in which, Laura told me, I could “actually win money, up to five dollars.” It was separate from the schizophrenia study, she told me. They were trying to find out whether the possibility of earning small sums of money was an incentive to faster learning. A sequence of symbols would appear on a computer screen, and you had to work out the order of the sequence by clicking the mouse on the symbol you thought would come next. If you got it right, a bell rang and a congratulatory sign flashed on the screen telling you that you'd won ten cents. If you got it wrong, a sad-clown buzzer noise announced you'd lost ten cents. It went on and on, and it was infuriating because it went too fast for you to really be able to work out the sequence. Every time I thought I'd definitely worked it out, after the bell rung again and again, suddenly the sad-clown buzzer would go off, mocking my confidence. After a while, I decided it must be a trick of some kind, that there was no connection. I started pressing symbols at random. This had me on a winning streak for a while, but soon even this proved false, when I started to lose again. It was like gambling when you don't know what game you're playing, and you can't slow down to find out. At the end of the test, I'd won two dollars and thirty cents.
"Not bad," said Laura, counting out my change.
"Well, what was it?" I asked.
"What was what?"
"The connection."
"Oh, I'm sorry. We can't tell you that." she said.
I wanted to hit her.
I was supposed to go back to Spring Grove the following week for the rest of the tests, but to be honest, I was in two minds about it. The first day had been really tiring, and the tests had been disappointingly boring. The only thing still held interest for me was the phrase "Brainwave Tests." I really wanted to have my brainwaves tested. I wanted to wear a metal helmet with lots of wires sticking out of it. I wanted to see the pattern of my brainwaves on a plasma screen. I could learn a lot about myself, I thought, from seeing my brainwaves.
The brainwave lab was located in what used to be one of the worker's cottages when Spring Grove was a fully-functioning asylum, and if you think the words "cottage" and "brainwave lab" make an uneasy pairing, you'd be right. I don't think I've ever seen a place that looked less like a laboratory than this small, single room consisting of a chamber about the size of a large phone booth, and a desk containing one or two computer terminals, a printer and some other equipment. Sitting at this desk was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Margaret and invited me to take a seat. Margaret was the brainwave researcher, and, as she told me what the "P50" would involve, Ruth squeezed behind me and started to attach electrodes to my scalp. The electrodes were covered it in a greasy lubricant, which Ruth explained was to help conduct the electricity. I was sitting on a wooden stool and Ruth could just about fit in the space behind me. There was very little room to maneuver. It all seemed so amateurish, like I was about to be given a lobotomy by a couple of kids playing in their dad's toolshed.
Sticking the electrodes to my head took a long time. Outside, in the hospital grounds, somebody was moving the lawn. It was a hot day in the middle of June.
Margaret explained that she'd be watching my brainwaves on a screen in front of her, measuring my responses while I listened to a series of tones. The point of the study, she said, was to identify brain regions that might be involved in schizophrenia.
I felt sure my brainwaves would look different from other people's. My brain HAD to be special.
"If you saw anything unusual, would you tell me?" I asked.
Margaret gave me a very patient, practiced look and began a speech she'd obviously given many times before.
"You have to understand," she explained, slowly. "I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a researcher. The tests we're giving you are to collect data for a series of research experiments. We won't be giving you the results of these tests. They're not those kinds of tests, they're control experiments. However, if you think there might be something wrong with your brain – if you've had a fall, a blow to the head, or anything like that – then you need to go and talk to your G.P."
In other words, I was irrelevant. Even as a brain, I was relevant only as a control test. They weren't interested in me, they were interested in data.
I felt very small.
Ruth led me into the cubicle, which was blacked out on the inside, the one window hung with a black curtain. It contained a wooden chair and a small desk with a cracked and peeling top. I sat down on the chair which swayed backwards dangerously. On the desk was a very old computer screen propped up with a copy of the 1987 Physician's Desk Reference Manual. Loose wires stuck out of the wall and trailed along floor. Ruth handed me a set of earphones, then connected the wires coming from to my head with another set of wires sticking out of the wall and wound scotch tape around the dodgy-looking connection. She explained that I should press a buzzer when I heard a tone in my earphones. "The most important thing," she said as she closed the curtain and turned out the light, "is to you keep your eyes open. We don't want you falling asleep."
I smiled. Fall asleep? I'd show them. My brain was active, fired up, ready to go. I wasn't one of those drooling schizophrenics with sluggish brainwaves. My brainwaves would cause a sensation.
The first tones started in my ears, and I pressed the buzzer just as I'd been instructed. The next thing I knew, Ruth was hammering her fist on the glass window of the booth.
"Open your eyes!" she yelled. "You're sleeping!"
I couldn't believe I'd been asleep, and tried to argue with them, but Margaret actually pointed to the evidence on the graph of my dozing brainwaves.
The problem was, it was so nice and warm and dark in the booth and the tests were so terribly boring. Margaret explained to me later that they were testing "sensory gating" or "pre-pulse inhibition" -– that is, the capacity to inhibit your response to a noise that you hear more than once. The first time you hear an unfamiliar noise, naturally, you're going to react, but when you hear it for a second or third time, the brain "gates it out," since by now it knows the noise is just a background distraction. Apparently, for some reason, schizophrenics don't seem to have this "gating" ability, so they'll respond to all noises with equal attention, unable to block out the ones the rest of us know are just harmless background sounds.
When we'd finished the tests, Margaret was kind enough to show me my brainwaves on her computer screen while Ruth was taking the electrodes out of my hair. Margaret said I had a pretty good reaction time on my "P50." She even showed me a comparison between my "P50" and that of a schizophrenic, but to tell the truth, I couldn't tell the difference. In fact, I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be looking at.
Once she'd removed the electrodes, Ruth showed me a bathroom and said, if I wanted to, I could wash my hair in the sink. She said they had a hair dryer, and although there was no shampoo, the soap in the dispenser worked pretty well. I washed all the greasy lubricant out of my hair and went back into the "lab," where Ruth offered me the choice of a red, blue, or green plastic comb and showed me a hair dryer, but she said I could only use it in the "lab" because there weren't any electrical sockets in the bathroom. I dried my hair while Ruth and Margaret cleaned down the table top. Before I left, Margaret offered me a lunch voucher, and, as with Jeanette before, was shocked when I said I didn't want lunch. Saying I didn't want lunch caused a far greater sensation than my brainwaves.
Who were these odd people, I wondered, to whom lunch was such a big deal?
Disillusioned and rather weary, I retraced my steps to the original building for my final series of tests. I thought about going home, but I told myself it was nearly over now, and I ought to stick it out long enough to pick up my full pay check, which I'd figured out would be around $200. Back in the waiting room, Jeanette said she wanted to get some video tape of my body movements while we were waiting for the eye lab technician to get back from lunch. I followed her and Murphy into another musty basement room, this one with no windows, where a video camera was set up and pointed at a chair. At the other end of the room was a long rack of dirty blue smocks and white coats waiting to be taken to the laundry. Jeanette picked up the camera, gave me a set of directions and filmed me as I did what she asked, which included things like “walk in a circle," "walk in a straight line," "lift your hands above your head," and "wave your hands in the air." With the hand movements, she demonstrated what she wanted me to do, which made things slightly better – at least we both looked totally ridiculous – but it reminded me of a game of Simon Says, or a police DWI test, and I was glad when it was over.
The final tests, which took place in the "eye lab" were the most arduous of the lot. They combined the worst elements of all the previous experiments – they were dull, endlessly tiring, and physically painful. The guy in the lab explained to me that people with schizophrenia often move their eyes differently than everybody else, in that their eyeballs tended to jump from side to side instead of gliding smoothly -- subtle but characteristic movements known as "saccades" that can only be observed, he explained, with the use of computer eye-tracking equipment. He told me they'd developed new, non-invasive, state-of-the-art instruments to evaluate people's eye movements and eye-blink conditioning.
Imagine a hot, dark dungeon constructed by a sadistic optician. Now imagine sitting for hours on a metal chair in this dungeon with your chin on a shelf, as though you're being tested for glasses, except that on your head is a big heavy eye mask with wires coming out of it on both sides. Through the mask's two pinholes, you have to follow the movements of little dots on a computer screen. It reminded me of the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange – that's how "non-invasive" it was.
Only, I wasn't watching anything nearly as interesting as scenes of violence and mayhem. I was watching dots flashing on a screen. For hours. Sometimes, after the dot had flashed on and off, I'd have to follow its progress across the screen with my eyes. Sometimes I'd have to look at a different dot with each eye; in one experiment I had to look at the place the dot was before it disappeared; in another, I'd have to look at the equivalent place on the opposite side of the screen. In the second series of tests, after a short break, I had to name the color of letters spelling out different colors (like the word "blue" in yellow letters, which wasn't as easy as it sounds), or discern the number hidden in a pattern of dots, or press a buzzer every time I saw the number eight, with the screenshots getting faster and faster all the time, until my head ached, my eyes were crossed, everything was just a big blur. I was going literally dotty.
The worst part of all was that, except for during the eye-blink test, I wasn't supposed to blink. And of course, as soon as I knew I couldn't blink, I started thinking about blinking, and really wanting to blink. Before long, I started to feel real strain in my eyeballs, making me highly aware for the first time that the eye is, in fact, like the brain, a muscle, and my eye muscles needed a rest. So did my head. I kept myself going by thinking about what it would feel like to get home. I imagined driving home, lying down on my bed in a nice, cool room, and rubbing my eyes with my fists as hard as I could for ages. Bliss.
Finally, I was released from the dungeon. The only things left for me to do was fill in some payment forms and get my finger and palm prints taken. My eyes were so tired that I'd stopped paying attention to my surroundings, but in the room where they took my fingerprints, I couldn't help noticing some rather inappropriately "comical" posters on the wall saying things like "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps."
What disappointed me the most about the two days I spent as a "psychological" guinea pig wasn't the run-down, low-tech nature of the tests and facilities -- though this was a disappointment, to be sure -- but the fact that it wasn't "psychological" at all. The recruitment ad had been so intriguing, with its talk of ghosts and psychic experiences, that I found it hard to believe there wasn't going to be any real interviews or discussions – let alone Ouija boards or mind-reading experiments -- and all I was going to be doing was pressing a buzzer when a dot flashed on a screen. I kept expecting something more. I suppose, naively enough, I was assuming that at some point, somebody would express an interest in who I was – my character, personality, beliefs, experiences and ideas. Granted, I'm not a genius or a psychic; perhaps I'm not particularly unusual or interesting – I'm probably not even on the spectrum of schizotypal personalities -- but, since these were supposed to be psychological tests, I'd imagined someone, somewhere during the eighteen hours would express at least some kind of engagement or curiosity about who I was. I gradually come to realize, however, that I was far more interested in the tests and the people giving them than they were in me.
This may have been partly due to how the research was divided. Since I did a different series of tests with each researcher, it felt rather like being on a factory production line. And to a factory worker, I imagine the items on the conveyer belt are all alike. After all, Joanne told me I was one of over 700 volunteer subjects they'd tested, not counting the schizophrenics and their families. All that was needed from me, essentially, was good data, data that would fit the pattern of their control group without distorting the averages. Of course, this is what guinea pigs are for – but since these were psychological experiments, I'd hoped that the researchers would be more interested in my mind than my brain. In the end, however, I realized that, like most other employees, what they were mainly interested in was what they'd be doing when they got out of work at five.