I'm going to be on national TV!

By now there are people in this city who know I'm always game for strange adventures, and one of these fine cats forwarded an e-mail to me asking for volunteers for an "experiment" to be televised on ABC. And so it was that this past wednesday I went to ABC studios on the west side for a taping for ABC Primetime.

The "experiment" was supposed to consist of looking at pairs of images depicting three-dimensional geometric shapes, and trying to discern whether the two shapes were the same. We were to write our responses to ten of these questions, and then to speak our answers aloud to an additional twenty such problems while sitting with five other people. It took a bafflingly long time for me to get called in to be tested and taped, and I soon found out why. They weren't really testing all six people in each group, they were only testing one - the other five were there to provide peer pressure. The other five would all give the same answer as each other, and were right 50% of the time. The idea was that the group could pressure a person into picking the wrong answer.

The theory behind this experiment is actually pretty interesting: apparently the areas of the brain involved in visual perception are colocalized with those involved in conformity, and the doctor who was running this experiment postulates that enough pressure to conform can affect visual perception. The area of the brain involved with nonconformity, the amigdala, is also the fear center of the brain.

I was one of two who tied for highest scores on the test, and my scores actually improved when the group was trying to lead me astray. Unfortunately, others who were tested did really badly, so on the day the accuracy dropped to something like an unspeakable 5%. I just hope this is not the only thing talked about on the TV show. I don't know when it's going to air, but they said it should be on in the next few weeks. I'll let you know.

P.S. There's another story involved with this one, about one of the participants hiring mercenaries to extract his daughter, who was stranded in New Orleans, but I'll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say, the day was very strange on the whole.