Laboratory

The place I expect to work may very well be a plain unimpressive building, down a short winding lane, about a fifteen-minute stroll from a university. A linked web of softly carpeted hallways inside the building, like an extension of the concrete path outside, guides patients to a door. When opened, the door murmurs a small protest as the carpet drags against the bottom. A mother and her young son enter the lab, he clutches her hand, however this place is not as terrifying as the term laboratory usually implies. There are thin white walls, and locked doors behind which are rooms humming with computers and unfamiliar technology, but mounted upon these stark vestiges of experimental purpose are colorful pictures of animals with happy grins like you might expect to find in a kindergarten school room.
The daytime residents of this place are mostly young women, usually working long hours at their computers. However on this day, one of these young women, a graduate student whose hooded eyes express her lack of adequate sleep, cheerfully greets the mother and her child. These are her subjects today, and together they walk a few doors further down the hallway, which looks confusingly similar to the previous hallway, and into another room. The entrance to this room requires them to step up as they go in, and the walls are markedly thicker, it is a soundproofed room.
There is a 4-legged chair in the middle of the room, and a large, black television screen on the wall facing the chair. The young graduate student asks the mother to sit with her child on her lap, and they speak for a while. Before she leaves the room, the graduate student places a pair of muffling headphones over the mother’s ears, so that she cannot unwittingly influence her child’s reactions, which are the reactions to be tested today. As the door closes, there is a notable tightness in the air inside the soundproof room. Through a small, thick window in another wall, the graduate student watches what happens inside.
She sits at a computer and focuses her attention on the experiment, while she codes the toddler’s reaction times intermittently, resulting in silence broken regularly by a pattering of clicks from her keyboard. In the thick silence inside the room, the television screen suddenly rouses and runs through a series picture and sound combinations that only the toddler can hear. The sounds are not English words, but nonsense syllables, however the toddler can hear the regularities in each combination. He is instructed by this television to “look!”, so he does, and this is what the experimenter is looking for herself.
The mother and her son leave the room, and are escorted through the tangle of hallways back to the front of the lab, and from this place they can find their way back. When the reach the front room, another mother and her young girl are seated on a couch, waiting their turn.