• Question: what age were you when you started doing experiments to find out what you know?

    Asked by shinpad to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Kids do experiments from the earliest age, trying to figure out how things work, seeing whether they’re edible (generally they aren’t), and exploring their surroundings. Curiosity driven exploration is at the heart of science.

      But I’m guessing you’re asking about my particular area of science? If so, I was 22 when I started my PhD but for that I used computer models to do experiments. It wasn’t until I was 28 and moved to the UK that I started doing brain scans with humans.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Hello there. I started doing experiments in “electrophysiology” (the technique I use to record the activity of brain cells), when I was 21 years old. Although I learnt most of the techniques I use now when I started my postgraduate studies at 24 years of age.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Well I remember asking my parents for one Christmas present and the Santa in the store for another to see which one I was given…

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      I did my first experiment on speech in my final year at university. I used distorted sentences that were altered so that they might sound like speech through a cochlear implant (a type of hearing aid). There’s an example sentence on my profile page (in a youtube link). Hearing people find these distorted sentences very hard to understand at first but they can learn to get better with training. I ran an experiment where I trained separate groups of people on different types of sentences to find out which properties of the sentences helped learning most. It turns out that ‘training’ sentences that contain no real words (like ‘Ut fode oo nussy rit eff su renchil nu duaft guh fa tand’) aren’t very good for learning, but anything with real words in, even if it doesn’t make sense (‘He was turning at his bread in his minute’) is as good as being trained with proper sentences. It was great to come up with my own idea, make up all those weird sentences (and make someone to record them for the test!), run the test and write up the results. My experiment was published as part of a longer journal article that my supervisor had written, and that felt great. I thought: I could do more of this!

    • Photo: Anne Seawright

      Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      I guess I started doing experiements at nursery when you plant a seed in a yoghurt pot to see what happens! But if you mean the research I am carrying out now then I started doing research at 24, after working as a vet for several years.

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