The Employment Duel

Today marked my first day as an employee of yet another Irish university, this time Trinity College Dublin. Like UCD, Trinity has chosen to entrust me with the minds of young people. These people, however, are a bit younger than my students at UCD. Mainly because they are 12. This job is not in the classroom, but in the lab, specifically, the neuroscience lab at the Lloyd Institute. I am working on a study that looks at cross-hemispheric attention in children with and without ADHD, using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

TMS is probably one of the coolest neurotechnologies, and is fast on its way to joining fMRI as one of my personal favorites. It works by stimulating the neurons in a specific location to fire, allowing the researcher to see the direct behavioral correlate to a specific brain region. We are looking at the motor cortex, so when we hold the coils to anyone's head, we are looking to make his or her fingers twitch. (One side effect of attempting to stimulate this area is uncontrollable blinking every time the machine pulses, due to the proximity of those neural regions. I know, having been a willing test subject myself...)

My first day was a long one, and I left the lab at quarter to 7 this evening, heading home to an evening of translation and correction for the UCD job. Tomorrow, I am off to try my luck (once again) with the Gardai, who (for the small sum of 150 euro) will give me a stamp officially welcoming me as a legal worker in Ireland. I don't know why I can't just pull the same stunt I did in Rome, and opt NOT to have a Permesso di Soggiorno...