Neuroscience of head injury

This thought was triggered by a recent news articles on the effects of sports injuries on the brain and how they are regularly missed (and mistreated).

Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/sports/football/16concussions.html?hp

It’s a sad story, but I probably won’t tell it accurately because it’s a story I have only heard fourth-hand.

A researcher is scanning the brain of a someone (e.g.  fMRI research). The brain of the student is basically smooth, the sulci and fissures of his cortex are hard to distinguish because they’re so fine.

So, naturally, the researcher is perplexed, and for safety purposes, brings in a radiologist to see the images.

They bring the student out, and the radiologist eventually discovers that the student plays university football.

As I understand this anecdote, through various retellings, this is a normal image for someone who has subjected themselves to head trauma for years and years and years.

Moral of the story: My kid won’t be playing football.

Reflections on procrastination: An emotion regulation perspective

Most people tend to think of procrastination as a problem with managing the slightly negative emotional reactions that come from diving into the work we need to do, suggesting that most procrastination behaviors are efforts to avoid the negative feelings associated with tackling a challenge, or finishing a manuscript, etc.

As a PhD student studying emotion regulation, I have convinced myself that I am much more aware of the influence of feelings on behavior than the average person (because you never know when a personal experience might drive a hypothesis).

Here’s my insight:

I tend to think the real problem with procrastination is in delaying gratification, not in avoiding the efforts associated with work.   For the most part, I like writing, but when I’m dragging my feet on a manuscript, its because the reward doesn’t come NOW, as I’m writing.   Only afterward, upon completion.   In the moments (think a flow state) that I’m making steady progress, I never procrastinate.

So here’s what I think is reaaaaly going on.

Procrastination is a problem with managing positive emotions, and to defeat procrastination, you have to fight a constant battle with those incremental positive emotional stimuli that line up over the course of a day to defeat you.

Each procrastination behavior is nothing more than an indulgence in the next positive thing that’s most accessible.

For example(s),

I anticipate the slightly positive feeling that comes from checking email a third, forth, fifth, sixth time, and indulge.

I anticipate the positive feeling of taking a break, and I indulge.

I anticipate the positive feeling with reading another blog post, and I indulge.

I anticipate the positive feeling of reading a book, and indulge.

I anticipate the positive feeling of writing a blog post, and indulge.

So how do you manage the indulgences?   Stay tuned for next time where I’ll provide some strategies. . .

Living on $15 a week: The Experiment

Abstract

One PhD student attempts to live on $15 dollars for 1 week.    Results = Win.

Introduction

In our modern society, financial resources are arguably limited.  Currently, there is no experimental study on the minimum amount of money one needs to live healthfully.    Fortunately, universities are unknowingly conducting naturalistic experiments to address this point on a daily basis:     However, the results from these experiments are presently unknown, as most PhD students do not document their current standard of living.

To address this question, of what constitutes the bare minimum, the author entered into a self-contract in which he would spend no more than $15 a week on food.   Furthermore, he agreed to share this information with the public, such that one might foolishly attempt to replicate the experiment at one’s own risk.

Methods

Participants

One PhD student.

Materials

$15 dollars.

Measures

Daily ratings of hunger were obtained.

Procedure

One PhD student enters a Trader Joe’s grocery store with $15 dollars, and must live off his purchases for one week.

Results

This PhD student used his $15 dollars to make the following purchases:

1 sack potatoes

1 box rice.

1 bag green onions

a dozen eggs

½ gallon of milk

1 loaf of bread

peanut butter

We did not anticipate as part of our experimental design that this PhD student would flout the rules by acquiring items that he did not purchase from his friend’s kitchen.    Nevertheless, said PhD student subsisted primarily off of baked potatoes, fried rice, egg-salad sandwiches, and cereal.

Daily ratings of hunger are reported in Figure 1.

Conclusions:

It’s unclear why the PhD student felt more hunger toward the end of the week.   We suspect that lack of food is the mechanism behind this effect.   But these data cannot be considered reliable because they rely on self-report.   Also, these data are correlational.    We cannot be entirely certain whether hunger increases over time, or time increases as hunger increases!

Lastly, living off $15 dollars a week appeared to be easy, if one steals food from friends.

Future investigations should investigate whether PhD students can live off their stipends without raiding other people’s pantries.

Thanks.

foursquare.com

It’s a site where you pretty much announce where you are.

I guess it’s for either

a) bragging about what you’re doing, ala, facebook. or

b) making a general announcement so friends can meetup with you.

If you “check-in” somewhere enough times, you become the “mayor” of that venue.

In two days. I’ll be the “mayor” of the Stanford Psychology Department.

A very useful tip: How to avoid interruptions.

I usually wear noise-cancelling headphones while I’m working.

You know what’s even better?

More than half the time I don’t even have them turned on.   That’s right, no noise-cancelling.   No music.   Nothing.

This eliminates all but the most pressing interruptions.

Typically, interruptions are like, “Hey Scott, what’s up?”

“Hey Scott, blah blah blah blah”.

Yeah, now get back to work.

Moral Dilemmas – - – A rant about the “Trolley problem”

Let’s start with a scenario:

A trolley is out of control, barreling down a track.  A mad philosopher has tied 5 people to the track.   On an alternate track, he has tied 1 person.    You can pull a lever, which will divert the trolley, and it will kill 1 person instead of 5.
What do you do?

Now, most people say it’s okay to pull the lever.

How about this one:   The same trolley is barreling down the track, only a very heavy weight placed in front of it will stop it.   There is a very fat man standing on a bridge over the track.   You can push him onto the track, causing his death, and it will save the 5 people.

Now what do you do?

The very same people who said it was okay to intervene in the first scenario, typically change their answer.

I’ve always considered it wrong in both scenarios.   Even if I can’t fully articulate the reason.

Here’s another variant similar to the first one:

A trolley is barreling down a track,  on it are 5 people.   You can divert another empty trolley onto its path, causing both to derail, saving all 5 people.    However, the trolleys, upon leaving the track, will kill a man who is sleeping in a hammock in his backyard.

What happens here?    If presented with this scenario first, most people will say it’s wrong to intervene.   Somehow, people don’t want to be responsible for this man’s death, but feel okay diverting the trolley in the first scenario.    I generally take a non-interventionist approach to any such scenario.    Ensuring that my hands are clean.

What about this one:

“A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.”   (from  Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Trolley Problem, 94 Yale Law Journal 1395-1415 (1985)).

Now what?      Near universal agreement that it’s wrong for the doctor to do such a horrid thing.

Of course, on a factual level, all these scenarios ask people to trade 1 life for 5.

Feel free to join in on the debate in the comment section.

the absurdity of “cautious optimism”

This phrase bugs me:  ”cautiously optimistic”.

I hear it every now and then.   And I saw it in today’s paper in reference to the successful capping of the oil spill.

But what does it even mean to be “cautiously optimistic”?

Would we license ourselves to use a similar construction in the opposite manner?

As in, I’m feeling something like, “hopefully pessimistic”?

I didn’t think so.

So I’m left with the conclusion that anytime somebody says they’re “cautiously optimistic”, they’re really just trying to disguise the fact that they’re a closet pessimist.

Think about it for a while. . .

Thoughts on teaching psychology

I teach an introductory psychology class during the summer, and here’s a few things I’ve noticed about my teaching style:

It’s lecture-based, but it might be more aptly described as stand-up comedy with powerpoint as a backup and psychology as the content.

Don’t take that the wrong way.   If you’ve never done stand-up comedy before, it takes lots and lots and lots of preparation.   Just like teaching.   And if it’s really good, everybody loves it, and it’s hilarious.   Just like good teaching.   And if it’s really really really good, people will talk about it for a long time afterward, and might even repeat what you’ve told them.   Just like excellent teaching.

Now, research psychologists (like myself) have studied a wide array of simple and complex behavior in various ways.   Some have employed research methods that are more clever than others.  And some of these research studies are wildly entertaining, and others are downright frightening, and some are little of both.

Consider yourself lucky if you’re ever given an opportunity to teach psychology.

However, if any of you have ever taught a social science class, you can relate to this:   There’s always a common recurrence, one that can be terribly frustrating if you don’t know how to handle it.

It’s when you teach a concept, and someone inevitably raises their hand with a personal anecdote that contradicts it.

It usually goes, “Well, my [name of person] has [diagnosis] and he/she doesn’t have [symptom commonly associated with that diagnosis].

Of course, if you properly explain statistics and variability, that will never happen.

And if all else fails, I recall one professor when I was an undergraduate who took this opportunity to proclaim:

“Your anecdote is not data”.

Was that from a bad teacher?   Here’s a hint:  I don’t remember much else from that class.

This one’s for Helene: Why I get up at 5AM everyday.

It wasn’t easy.   But I’ve done it.   I’ve become a morning person.

For my loyal readers, you might remember that the past few times I’ve attempted this, I’ve failed.  But this habit is set in stone now, and I’m going to share the story of how it started.

About 7 weeks ago, I awoke at 4:30AM, wide awake, having forgotten to have finished an important task that I had agreed to finish by that day.

So I got out of bed, and got to work.

And I was finished by 10AM, on something that probably would have taken over 8 hours if I had attempted to complete it in my office during the typical work hours.

So why is that?

NOOOOOOOO DISTRACTIONS!

Of course, thinking like a scientist, I realized that this correlation between time of day and increased task-focus may have been due to my deadline for that task, among many other factors.

So I challenged myself with another feat, spending those wee morning hours working on a review paper that I’ve been working on forever (note:  I had no set deadline on when I would finish this, just an arbitary ever-moving deadline that I could push back at any time, and regularly did).

And for the following 3 weeks, I forced myself out of bed at 5am, and made myself work on this document between the hours of 6:00am and 11:00am, everyday.   And with nothing to distract me, I produced a draft in 3 weeks (it’s roughly a 50 page document)

Now, I’m not going to spend too much space about why I think early rising has supercharged my productivity, but here’s a few guesses:

1)  Procrastinating is much harder, psychologically.   If you start to procrastinate, you just end up realizing that you got up at 5:00am to do nothing, which is pretty motivating to get you back on task.

2)  There really aren’t any distractions:  Who’s going to call you at 6:00am and invite you to a party?  (Okay, maybe during a World Cup soccer match, but that’s still rare).

3)  It’s quieter, a perfect environment for getting stuff done.

Next time, I might talk about the difference between outcome goals, and process goals, and why the latter is better for you.

——————————

Note:  Who is Helene?  Helene is a loyal reader who reminded me that I had been neglecting the blog.   Thanks Helene.   It won’t happen again.

blogging and publications

In academia, publications are everything.

Does blogging count?

I hope so, because I have this post running over at Psychology Today right now:http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/exploring-emotions/201004/what-tiger-woods-and-you-should-know-about-emotion-regulation

Enjoy.