How can I change a mecanim animation by pressing a key?

Hi!

I have a character with 2 animations. One is just an idle that will loop forever until I press the spacebar (I changed the tag to 'Activate'). From there it will transition into a series of other animations.

I have set this up in the Animator window and I made a boolean parameter called 'hitSpace' to be used in a script.

This is the control script I wrote. I hooked it up to the character but it does nothing! It doesn't give any errors but it also doesn't show anything in the console when I press space (maybe it doesn't usually do that anyway?).

Can anyone help me?

 using UnityEngine;
 using System.Collections;
 
 public class Alien_Behaviour : MonoBehaviour {
 
     // Use this for initialization
     private Animator anim;
     private bool hitSpace;
 
     void Start () 
     {
         anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
         hitSpace = false;
     }
     
     // Update is called once per frame
     void Update () 
     {
         if(Input.GetButtonDown("Activate"))
         {
             hitSpace = true;
             anim.SetBool("hitSpace", hitSpace);
         }
         else
         {
             hitSpace = false;
             anim.SetBool("hitSpace", hitSpace);
         }
 
     
     }
 }