Running tests

two snails negotiating an aloe, via almost taiwan

I get to meet a lot of different people, but they're not that different. Nearly all of them are associated with the good local university, most are master's / PhD students or professors. I met a PhD student doing work on cognitive science, linguistics and special education. A really bright guy, and fun to talk to, as he sees one thing in many different ways.

His English was good, but there was one odd thing. He kept referring to both of us in the third person. He's called Bruce and I'm called Paul, and so he would say something like:

I'm studying face recognition, so we attach some sensors to Paul's head, and then when Paul sees Bruce, we can see what lights up in his brain.

It seemed rude to interrupt and correct him, as we weren't having a class but a discussion. But then later I got half the idea that maybe he was running some kind of test on me - we were talking on campus - and possibly I was being filmed. Which would work out fine. Some of our talk was on mirror neurons, autism, suggestibility and hypnosis, and while we were talking I was consciously mirroring his movements with slightly smaller, slightly different ones of my own, to a) create rapport [possibly], b) test his suggestibility, and c) keep myself alert and very interested in him, not only his words [see (a)].

Paul and Bruce, testing each other.