Human Guinea Pigs Sniff Vanilla Extract, Eat Candy, and Chug Coffee

Beth Buyea’s Human Physiology class took over the third floor of Cutler Science Center May 2 and 5 as 27 student, faculty, and staff volunteers subjected themselves to experiments that students designed.

At one table, Daisy Letendre ’09, Sarah Heist ’08, and Meredith Storrs ’09 were sticking three electrode pads to the legs of their subjects and then whacking them on the patellar tendon just below the kneecap with a reflex hammer, which was also wired to a computer. The purpose? To measure reflexes before and then after a walk down to the basement of Cutler and back up to the third floor. They were comparing the results of students with those of adults in the community. Elizabeth Arthur ’08, barely winded, offered her knee after the climb.

David Rome ’08, Nick Clough ’08, and Chris Brown ’08 offered snipped straws that subjects stuck into a bottle of vanilla extract to see how long it took for “olfactory fatigue” to set in. Testers sniffed peppermint next until they could smell no more. The boys’ hypothesis was that all smells took about the same time to dissipate in the smeller’s nose, and it was being born out by Outreach Director Annie Neill ’97, who said she has a “terrible sense of smell.”

Across the hall, Philippa Sanbongi ’08 was pouring coffee from a carafe into Styrofoam cups while students took tests before and after swallowing down a cup or two to test the effects of caffeine on academic performance. Chris Ackley ’08, Martin Tarintino ’08, Molly DeLallo ’09 and Philippa thought the joe would enhance the test-takers’ abilities. In the lab, another group with a bag of Skittles was testing the effect of sugar on the brain’s ability to solve problems.

Buyea says that this type of investigation is important in teaching science. “This is their way of saying, ‘Let me actually see what happens instead of just being told what happens.’ … They are able to really see the scientific method through from beginning to end.”

Students also see first-hand how difficult it is to design, experiment, and obtain results. “It becomes a great discussion for errors—did their testing prove or disprove anything is a great conversation to have,” Buyea adds.
Here’s a list of the students’ experiments (results were posted in Cutler at the Science Symposium May 14):

• olfactory fatigue with varying smells
• academic performance with caffeine use
• comparing lung capacity and height and weight
• effects of caffeine and sugar on blood pressure and pulse
• effects of multiple external stimuli on heart rate
• muscle fatigue and reflex response
• brain dominance testing