"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."
~ Dr. Seuss
Since the girls were all born in a teaching hospital, we are occassionally called with a request for one of them to participate in a research study. Nina took part in a cognitive study earlier this week. Apparently, there is a tiny region of the brain that is responsible for face recognition (the right middle fusiform gyrus, if you were wondering). The hypothesis of the study is that there is also a part of the brain that handles number recognition. Nina's job was to play a video game inside an MRI machine where she was shown numbers, letters, faces, and other random things like shoes, so researchers could watch to see what part of the brain was stimulated when she saw the numbers. Interesting stuff.
I am horribly claustrophobic and avoid MRIs at all costs, but I am striving to not pass on my personal phobias to my children. I even made J.C. take each of the girls to her first dentist appointment to avoid instilling my own anxieties about the dentist in my children. I really had to take a deep breath and put on a smiling face as we walked into the MRI room. You couldn't have paid me enough money to lie down in that machine myself, but Nina happily jumped in with the promise of a Barbie doll from the researcher. She lay still, did great, and now we have this lovely picture of her brain... perhaps a contender for this year's Christmas card?
Dentist and MRI... two phobias down. Now, how do I teach my children to be neat and tidy and pick up after themselves better than I do?
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