“The brain is a wild and wonderful thing,” Dr Spaceman tells me in his office, which shares a high-rise building’s basement floor with a Woolies Metro. We’re meeting so I can interview Spaceman about his recent investigations into the student brain. 

He gestures to a congealed lump of cooked spaghetti rawdogged on his desk. The pasta serves as a makeshift model of the brain, which Spaceman prods with gloved hands. “The work began in Semester One, and it’s taken months, no weeks, to compile it all!”

He was initially trying to investigate student mental health during exam periods. Instead,  Spaceman found something far more likely to achieve low-grade internet virality (more than one hundred shares on TikTok, at least two hundred Instagram stories and an eventual Facebook post cobbled together by someone’s mum). 

According to his research, talking about doing your assignment does amount to actually doing your assignment, neurologically speaking. Through a mixture of questionnaires, medical imaging and a technique Spaceman calls “following students and recording their words and images with my video camera from 2005”, he’s put together an abundance of data. When asked if obtaining the students’ consent to be recorded was a challenge, Spaceman replies,” you lose 100 per cent of the shots you ask before taking, so I never asked.”

Spaceman claims his brain imaging revealed that the same areas of the brain that light up when a student hits ‘submit’ on an assignment also light up when a student says phrases such as:  “I can’t come, I have to do my assignment” and “I need to work on my assignment”. Similar results were produced when they Googled the Pomodoro method. It seems that the brain recognises all these interactions as signs of productivity and sends out signals that something has been achieved. 

The brain even takes in visual cues as signs of productivity. So, when a student sets their phone on “do not disturb” or snags a spot in the ERC Library, the brain believes a large part of the task is complete and reacts accordingly.

Students have had mixed reactions to the news. While 75 per cent agreed that they felt a sense of accomplishment turning down plans under the guise of doing assignments, 80 per cent said they could not comment because they were working on an assignment. Meanwhile, 50 per cent did not believe these findings would have any impact on their life or grades. 

“That actually makes so much sense,” says Kiara, an English Honours student. “Because sometimes I feel relaxed right before a deadline, but my document is still blank! All I did was tell people that I was putting my life on hold until after I submitted my thesis.”

Louisa, a first year neuroscience student, says she spoke to Dr Spaceman for his research. When told about his findings she says, “All he did was draw dots on cartoon outlines of brains!”

“It’s not so much scientific proof as it is making wild theories come true with no conceivable end goal,” Spaceman says, nibbling at a piece of spaghetti stuck to his glove.   

What does Spaceman hope to achieve through his research? “Once teaching staff learn how to grade intention, then we’ll really be cooking,” he says, knuckles-deep in spaghetti.

UniMelb students echo his sentiment.

“The hermeneutic labour of preparing for an assignment should be included in the rubric. And why don’t we have a 24/7 library yet?”