Question: What is your favourite experiment to do?

Alex Baxendale answered on 23 Mar 2021:

We get to do lots of different things all of the time, so I have done a bunch of different stuff. My favorite was probably one I did about 5 years ago where we got people to look at different words that do and don’t go together (so the words chair and table would go together, but lemon and table would not go together). But whilst doing this we had a special electromagnet (called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) that we used to ‘zap’ people on the back of their heads in a place called the ‘cerebellum’. The magnet stopped that area of the brain from working properly for about 20 to 30 minutes. What we were looking for was whether that area of the brain we shut down was used when looking at different pairs of words, which it was! (but only on one side).
The experiment might not sound too exciting, but the electromagnet was super cool which is why it was my favorite!