If you live near a college campus or ride the bus or train to work,
it's pretty common to see signs like these around
saying things like, "Are you an adult woman with asthma? You may qualify for this research study!"
There are all kinds of medical and research opportunities out there.
But I bet most of you never take up the offer to participate and that's fine. I don't blame you.
It seems like kind of a scary unknown thing. What if it's a ploy to lure me in and harvest my organs!?
Okay, maybe not, but it does seem daunting. Mostly just because...
...it's not something we do every day.
Well, recently, a couple of my friends, Maggie and Steph,
asked me to be a subject in their pilot study for a new project that they're working on.
So I took the chance to be a part of the science,
and I wanted to share my experience of being a research subject with all of you.
I know Maggie and Steph because they're both students in the same graduate program as me.
It's pretty common for students who use human subjects in their research to ask their friends to help out.
I've actually been asked to help out with other research studies in their lab
but wasn't able to make it work because of scheduling issues.
I've always wanted to participate because their lab uses functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI
to study the brain and I've always been curious about what it's like to be in an fMRI scanner.
As an added bonus, I knew that they'd do an anatomical scan of my brain
and I wanted to know what my brain looked like.
Anyway, I talked with Maggie and Steph and they gave me a summary of what they're interested in researching.
STEPH: So we're currently running a pilot study that you were so kind to be a subject in.
MAGGIE: The ultimate goal of this study is basically to figure out how- the way that the brain represents
human faces is different depending on what kind of task a person is doing.
STEPH: There's this idea that, perhaps, your brain kind of deals better with low-dimensional signals
and what I mean by low-dimensional is just if you think about a cube versus a square versus a line.
A line is a much kind of simpler geometric shape and it's much lower-dimensional than a cube., for example.
It's one dimension versus three dimensions in a cube.
And so there's this kind of idea out there that the brain kind of compresses incoming information
into a low dimension in order for you to then act on it.
So what I mean by that is you see a face,
it has all of these properties and so your brain's gotta kind of compress that information
into some low-dimensional representation in order for you to make a decision on it.
MAGGIE: So we know a little bit about how attention affects kind of simpler visual processing
for, like, colors, shapes, and spatial locations.
But there's not a lot of work that's been done already focusing on
how vision detects these kind of more complex visual things like objects and faces.
ALIE: After saying I was on board,
Maggie, Steph and I picked an evening when the fMRI scanner was available
since many different researchers use the same machine.
To prepare, I was told to wear comfortable clothing, remove any jewelry,
and to wear contacts instead of glasses.
This is because the fMRI machine uses a giant magnet to track blood flow in the brain.
So, you don't want to wear anything metal in the scanner, or it might get...
well, pulled right off your body.
When I arrived at the special facility where the machine is housed,
Maggie and Steph explained the activity to me.
Essentially, while I fixated on one point, faces would flash on the screen,
and I would have to press a button if the face I was seeing was the same as the face before it.
This sounds pretty easy, but the faces were actually all very similar.
Researchers had altered and combined four different photographs
that they could actually be arranged on a wheel.
They were either more white or more Asian in appearance,
and either more female or more male.
The whole goal was to track how well I was able to discriminate between the different faces,
even though they sometimes looked very similar.
MAGGIE: We really just chose these dimensions because they're perceptually meaningful for people
and because it's very easy to tell someone,
"Pay attention to race" or "Pay attention to gender of the face".
But it could just as easily be some other, like, visual feature of the faces that's not so cognitively meaningful.
Um, we're really not trying to say anything about the meaning of race and gender and the human brain.
I would say we're not really interested in face processing on the whole, either culturally or otherwise.
We're really just interested in how attention works in the brain.
ALIE: After going over the task, I had to fill out a waiver to verify that I don't have any health conditions
that would make it dangerous for me to go into the fMRI machine,
or disrupt its ability to do the scan.
And to make sure that I would fit inside the machine comfortably.
The bed used for the scans is pretty narrow and the space inside is kind of claustrophobic,
so it's definitely not for everyone.
STEPH: Being in the scanner can be, you know, a little bit surprising your first time
because it's this huge magnet, basically,
that'll suck anything metal that's on you towards it.
And then, also, if you're at all claustrophobic that can be a bit of an issue.
It's tight in there, you know. The pull sequences actually make quite a bit of noise
and so it's not quite as kind of relaxing as it might look from the outside, I guess,
but it's not so bad.
ALIE: You can learn more about how fMRI machines work by checking out our video over on Tom Scott's channel.
Click here or find a link in the description below.
Finally, they use a metal detector wand just like the kind of security guard might use
to check and make sure that I didn't have any forgotten metal on my body,
and then we went into the scanner.
As Maggie and Steph set up the bed,
I put in earplugs to protect my ears from the loud noises the machine makes.
The machine uses a giant electromagnet to perform the fMRI scan
and while it's running, it makes a very loud clicking sound. So the earplugs are important.
Then they handed me the emergency ball,
which I could press at any time if I needed to come out of the machine,
and the controller for responding to the task.
Then I laid down on the narrow bed and Maggie and Steph covered me with a blanket.
That part is optional but it gets pretty chilly in the scanner room.
They slip the special headpiece down over my face
and then wedge foam padding in around my head to keep it as stable as possible,
so I wouldn't move during the scan and ruin the images.
Because I had to lie on my back in the machine,
they use a complex screen mirror and projector setup so that I would be able to see the task
directly over my face without having to move at all.
Finally, they slid me into the scanner, left the room and I was alone in the chilly dark, ready to start the task.
The scan itself was demanding, not because the task was hard,
but because it's a lot more difficult to stay focused for that long than you might think.
I had to stare at the screen for two hours and concentrate on the faces I was seeing,
so I could try to answer correctly.
Not being able to move *at all* for two hours is tough.
I couldn't scratch my nose or stretch my neck or anything. By the end, I was super tired.
But, I did it, and according to my scores I was pretty good at the task too.
A couple weeks later, I went back to do it all over again
so that Maggie and Steph would have two different sets of data to use for their pilot study.
With this data, they're hoping to better understand how the brain understands faces at a high level.
We know a little bit about how we see faces, thanks to earlier research.
For example, we've identified an entire brain area called the fusiform face region that helps us identify faces,
but it's less clear how we distinguish between faces
and how our brains process different kinds of facial features and traits.
By having participants like me make decisions based on the faces they were showing me while I'm in the scanner,
they're able to get a glimpse of which areas of my brain are active when I'm deciding,
and that helps them better understand how my brain is perceiving those faces.
And that was it! I did the thing.
To be honest, if I'd just seen a flyer for this study on a light post,
I probably would have walked right past it.
But I feel good helping my friends and helping move science forward.
And...
I got to 3D print my brain.
Other people participate in research studies for lots of reasons.
Sometimes it's because they have a particular medical or health condition
and want to help doctors better understand it,
or aid in the development of new treatments,
either with the hope that the treatments may benefit them
or that it may help others with their condition in the future.
Sometimes it's because you actually get paid to be a research subject.
I got $20 an hour helping Maggie and Steph.
It's an easy way to make money on the side if you've got the time, and,
sometimes it's just because you're interested in the science
and want to help researchers better understand the human brain.
Whatever the reasons, it's actually pretty easy to get involved in scientific research.
Organizations like ResearchMatch exist to help interested participants find projects
where they might make good subjects
and get connected to the researchers leading the studies.
And they're not all fMRI studies either.
For example, I have a friend who's participated in ongoing stem cell trials
related to a genetic condition they have.
Or you could be part of an EEG study.
Or you can even just participate in behavioral studies through online surveys
like Amazon's Mechanical Turk program.
There are tons of options.
So next time you see a sign on campus, take the stub, give it a shot and see what you think.
Have you ever been part of a research study? What was it for? And how was your experience?
Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for watching this episode of Neuro Transmissions.
Until our next transmission, I'm Alie Astrocyte.
Over and out.
[Outro music]