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Asked by MCR to Simon, Damien, Rachael, Suzi, Tim on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by smileyface123, kfarquharson.
Question: What is the most interesting experiment you have ever done?
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Simon Bennett answered on 10 Jun 2011:
Hello,
Probably putting a type of black widow spider venom onto a muscle I had dissected from the back paw of a mouse to see what effects it had.
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Tim Fosker answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Hi @theawkening and @smileyface123
That is a difficult question. Most of the experiments I have done have been interesting to me, but the results were not always exciting. My favourite experiment is always my most recent experiment because the more you do experiments the better you get at designing them to answer your interesting questions.
My most recent experiment is looking at what sounds the brain focuses on most when we hear words. Certain changes in the sounds of words help us break them into parts. It is really important to be able to break words into parts if you want to learn to read. So understanding how the brain does this is really interesting.
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Suzi Gage answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Hi @theawakening and @smileyface123
I answered this question for someone else yesterday, so here’s my answer copied and pasted!Ooh this is a tough question.
I did a really cool experiment where we tried to find out whether ‘beer goggles’ really exist – so whether people think others are more attractive when they’re drunk!
This meant getting a lot of the undergraduate students in to our lab, giving them vodka, and then getting them to rate the attractiveness of pictures of faces and pictures of landscape scenes. Great fun to run!Thanks for your question 🙂
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Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:
The coolest experiment I’ve ever taken part in was about what people think when they hear other people say certain things. What does it make you think when you hear someone “dropping their g’s” – pronouncing ‘writing’ as if it was ‘writin’? For a lot of people, hearing “dropped g’s”, like in a London accent (or others), makes them think that the person doing it is maybe working-class, or not very well educated. (That might well be the wrong thing to think – in a lot of cases it probably is! – but a lot of people think that way just the same!) Anyway, I was once in an experiment that brilliantly showed how sensitive people are to that.
What we had to do was listen to something being read, and then say what we thought of the person reading it. They were reading something that was written so it would sound like them talking about themselves – and the passage had lots of words ending in “ing” in it, like “looking”, “morning”, “ceiling” and so on, so lots of opportunities for someone to “drop their g’s”. What we thought before was that people noticed it generally but didn’t count exactly how many g’s had been “dropped” – so, if someone heard a passage with 10 “ing’s” in it and 9 of them had a “dropped g”, they would think that person was working-class, but someone who only dropped 8 of the g’s would be just as working-class: they wouldn’t be less working-class because they had dropped fewer g’s than the person who dropped 9. Well, we found out that that wasn’t true – people DO count, and so the person who dropped 9 out of a possible 10 g’s WAS considered more working-class than the person who only dropped 8! It’s not often that an experiment’s result is so close to what you ideally thought. So I thought that was really cool, because it was a direct scientific proof of something that English-speakers instinctively know already.
You’ll notice I have put “dropped g’s” in “quote marks” in this answer. That’s because nothing’s really dropped when you “drop a g”! People think it is, because when you do it the sound you make is “in”, which is spelt with one less letter than “ing” is – so something must have been dropped. But linguists concentrate on the sounds and not the written letters, and there are just as many sounds in “writin’ ” as there are in “writing”!
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