I made $200 in 6 hours today by participating in a psychology experiment. If you don’t want to do the calculation by yourself, that’s $33.33 an hour. I wish I could participate in psychology experiments as a full-time job for eight hours a day and five days a week – if all the experiments were like the one that I did today, I would be making about $70,000 a year before taxes.

The beginning of the day involved sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen with images flashing in front of me. I placed three fingers of my right hand on the 1, 2, and 3 keys on the keyboard and rated the images as negative, neutral, or positive.

That seemed easy and innocent until they started showing me pictures of mutilated faces with crusted blood, a woman who appeared to have the world’s worst case of breast cancer, a police officer standing over a shot body, and slaughtered horses on a field.

After that, I moved on to a separate room where I played a handful of games involving probability and gambling. During one of the games, I realized that instead of putting effort into trying to guess the correct answer, I would end up getting just as many points from the game by randomly guessing.

I think the game was rigged, because out of the eight or so trials that I randomly guessed on, I got them all wrong.

After that, I had some lunch while filling out some questionnaires, then played a few more games involving economics and sight. Finally, the hardest part came up.

The experimenters put a net over my head that was supposed to measure brain wave activity. The problem was that the net had about a hundred or so nodes, and it had to be put into salt water so they would stick properly to my scalp and pick up all the activity. Putting the actual thing on my head took an extremely long time, then I had to do eight trials of an activity that takes seven to eleven minutes for each trial.

I think the reason I got paid so much is because of how frustratingly uncomfortable that last part was.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2