Graduate Student Guide

Here's something interesting my undergraduate adviser has sent out to his mailing list-- a Graduate Student Guide written by another professor in the department. I am happy to say I have followed most of the points for years 1 and 2, so I guess I'm on the right track! Guess my adviser knew what he was talking about when he said I needed to learn MATLAB ;)

The Apprenticeship

Expectations for your First year…
Ø A reasonable workload for a first year graduate student is 60 hours a week spent on psychology in one way or another—courses, assistantship duties, research, reading, and thinking. You have transitioned from being an undergraduate to being an apprentice, from a consumer to a producer, from an amateur to a professional. If you do not feel comfortable with these constraints, if you thought I was joking when I said 60, if you still feel like an undergraduate, if you do not feel comfortable selling your soul to the company store, it is something best resolved early. If you want to excel, you might think of 60 hours as a minimum. Immerse yourself. Your first year in graduate school may (and probably should) be one of the hardest-working years in your career! Right now, you know the least and have the most to learn, and learning is hardest when you know theleast. The harder you work in your first year, the easier and more enjoyable each next year of your career will be. An important side note – do NOT make decisions about how much you should work based on how much the other students around you are working. Most students will not work as much as you should if you really want to be successful. Finally, remember that you’re not working this hard for me, you’re working this hard for you. Here’s a parable to think about:

The master Soyen Shaku passed from this world when he was sixty-one years of age. Fulfilling his life’s work, he left a great teaching, far richer than that of most Zen masters. His pupils used to sleep in the daytime during midsummer, and while he overlooked this he himself never wasted a minute.

When he was but twelve years old he was already studying Tendai philosophical speculation. One summer day the air had been so sultry that little Soyen stretched his legs and went to sleep while his teacher was away.

Three hours passed when, suddenly waking, he heard his master enter, but it was too late. There he lay, sprawled across the doorway.

“I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon,” his teacher whispered, stepping carefully over Soyen’s body as if it were that of some distinguished guest. After this, Soyen never slept again in the afternoon.

Ø One of the most important things you should be doing every week is reading, reading, reading! Read voraciously, you have a lot to learn. You will not become an expert if you just read what I tell you to read. I am going to recommend readings to you, but this is not enough. Although you should seek my advice regularly, you must take responsibility for guiding your reading.[1] Reading is the single best source for research ideas, and I do believe that good reading will eventually help good writing. I would suggest your reading be mostly systematic (learning a literature rather than piecemeal reading in many different unrelated literatures) but with some sampling (if a topic or reference in one paper sounds interesting, follow that lead). I will expect regular progress reports on what you’ve been reading. I also expect you to remind me to talk to you about how to organize your literature and about notetaking.

Ø With respect to becoming an independent researcher: You will start on “my” projects and will transition to working on “your” projects (no later than fourth year). If you start having ideas of your own sooner, great – we’ll talk about them and make decisions about whether they are do-able and whether they should be done (some ideas that are do-able are not worth doing—as you become more expert in the field, you’ll get better at distinguishing between those that are worth doing and those that aren’t).

Ø I expect you to show a command over the introductory material of your classes. In this regard, I expect no failures (i.e., C) and for you to excel (i.e., A) in at least one area. It is particularly important that you get as much out of your statistics courses as possible – take them very seriously! These are tools that you will carry in your toolbox for the rest of your career.

Ø Another important tool that you might neglect adding to your toolbox but should not: If you are not already a proficient programmer, you should be thinking seriously about beginning to correctthis deficiency no later than the summer of your first year. The sooner you can program your own projects, the happier you’ll be. I can give you a crash course to get you started, and other graduate students who already know how to program are usually also very willing to help.

Ø I expect you to develop the managerial skills and professional commitment to warrant solid comments from the supervisor of your teaching or research assistantship.

Ø I expect you to begin conducting research in your first semester and to continue this practice over the semesters, increasing it over the years. Typically, early research ideas will be mine, later ones—ours, final ones—yours.

Ø I expect you to complete a project with me by the end of the Spring term to a point where we could send the work out for review if appropriate.

Ø I expect you to be visible in the department by beginning to develop the habit of attending Department functions, workshops, and colloquia. Cognitive students should attend every function of the cognitive program, virtually all functions of the experimental program, and most functions outside your program. You should be especially cognizant of lectures presented by visiting scholars in any area where your attendance will reflect on the department, the program, and the lab. Attending talks outside of your interest area is a great way of gaining some perspective on the field and might be useful in the future when talking to other psychologists at work or conventions. So, if there is a talk on “Forbidden Adolescent Sexual Practices,” even if you have no interest in the topic you should go.

Ø I expect you to be visible in the lab, to be active in its administration and functioning, and to be available to help senior personnel, the undergraduates, and your peers.

Ø You should try to attend a professional conference this year (visible in the profession) if only as an observer. The funds required can often be nontrivial, but keep in mind that you can sharelodging with other graduate student, and such experience is as much an investment in your future as is a class.

Expectations for your Second Year…
Ø You must take the lead on at least one research project and carry the project through to the manuscript stage, ideally for submission to a journal, by the end of summer. This normally will be your Masters project. But don’t worry, I’ll be here to help you and provide support all the way, especially if you seek it out when you are struggling.

Ø You should still be reading voraciously. Most ideas for new research (e.g., an idea for your Masters) come from reading existing research.

Ø You will begin mentoring any 1st year graduate students admitted into the lab.

Ø You will assume laboratory management responsibilities relinquished by senior graduate students who have left to form their own “dissertation lab” (see Year 4).

Ø You should present at a conference (either a national or well-respected regional).

Ø By the end of the second year, the cognitive area will make the decision whether to continue you to the Ph.D. or to terminate your training at the Masters level. It is unfair to have a student of questionable ability struggle to meet the minimum demands of a profession and never show bursts of achievement that suggests he or she could be a successful doctoral level professional.

Expectations for your Third Year…
Ø You will become an expert in a broad subarea of cognitive psychology. This does not mean an expert at some student level of understanding, but an expert at a professional level. This includes but is not limited to mastery of the theories, methods, data, arguments, assumptions, and perspectives ofthat area. It also includes an understanding of how that subarea fits into its parent area of cognitive psychology.

Ø You will take your qualifying examinations, much of which is the expertise you develop in Point 1. This should be completed before the beginning of your fourth year.

Ø You should be involved in at least two lines of research and serving as primary manager of at least one of these.

Ø You will present at a national conference.

Ø You will become much more heavily involved in writing manuscripts for eventual publication. If you are to be the senior author, we will outline the manuscript together but you will then complete first drafts with minimal assistance until revision. If you are not to be senior author, you will nevertheless take some responsibility for writing at the draft and revisionstage.

Ø You will begin to take a leadership role both within the lab and amongstyour peers. Leadership skills are important to the future doctoral level professional.

Expectations for your Final Years…
Ø Your final years will be spent developing and managing your own laboratory. For your projects, I will serve as a consultant and coauthor. You will begin to recruit your own undergraduate RAs (under my course number), establish your own lab meetings, and conduct your own projects. One of which will be, of course, your dissertation.

Ø You should be writing manuscripts for publication, and presenting at conferences.

Ø You will complete a proposal and oral defense of your dissertation, which will be an original contribution to the literature.


[1] You should do three things: figure out what literature(s) you want to master (usually, the ones you are most interested in), gather the literature, and then read and take notes on the literature. How to know what you’re interested in? This may take a year or two (and will continue to change over the entire course of your career). Keep a keen eye for things that spark your curiosity. Also note that the more you know about something, the more interesting it becomes, so don’t give up on something right away.

Weekend Update Part 2...

...will commence as soon as I finish clipping my long, scraggly nails.

OK awesome. If you are reading this, it means I have finished my 500-word quota for the day! That doesn't mean those 500 words weren't junk, but there you have it. I generate words.

Now I'm rejoicing and playing with slinky 2.0 (since I broke my first one like the child I am and my mother so kindly sent me another).

Let me first update you on the hiking situation-- it is not happy! :(
See sad face above. I can't go on the next hike to Dartmoor because it's another weekend trip, and it's 40 pounds. So not only does it take 2 days out of my precious studying time, but it's also majorly expensive, and I just bought the club hoodie for 25! I en't made of money!

So I went to the Dartmoor sign-up to pay for my hoodie, and that was when the club captain said the boots I won would have to be reviewed on that trip or nothing. I told him I didn't realize I didn't have more time, and offered up my free boots to whomever would be able to use them on the hike.

However, when the captain sent out the e-mail that my boots were available to review, he didn't offer to let that person keep them afterwards-- which seems to suggest that he still wants me to have them! But I don't see how I have more right to them than anyone else, seeing as my name was just drawn from a hat. But we shall see.

So I feel bad for not being able to go to Dartmoor, but it was a thrifty decision. I procrastinate too much as it is, so I followed Scrooge's example this time and chose work over people.

Nevertheless, I did NOT choose work over people when I went out with a couple of people on my course this past Thursday for dinner! Hannah knew of a hidden hole-in-the-wall pub on London Road that serves classic English food-- which is basically anything hot and swimming in gravy-- and she, Carly, and I ventured out of our psychology-hole to have our first-ever night out together (yes, 5 months after we all met each other-- it's a slow process), where we talked about life and ate cake. It was great! Later that night when I was visiting Jana, she told me I smelled like beer and smoke, which is basically the ambiance this particular pub radiates. It's definitely a student joint, quite a bit shabbier than your usual English pub-- ripped and stained couches, table numbers scrawled on old green bottles in white-out, and all.

But Amber (old friend from WA) seems to think anything English is going to be sexier than anything American, so I suppose she'd find the drunken haze of a student pub 'enchanting' as long as it was called a pub and not a bar. Apparently she knows nothing of the old "rat statistic" either, which states that you're never more than 10 feet or so from a plague-ridden rodent in this country.

In other news...

Atlas Shrugged is going to be a movie! I'm so excited! It looks like it's going to be an accurate portrayal of the book-- so be prepared for controversy! It isn't suggestive of atheism as was the way of The Golden Compass, but rather expresses a moral and political philosophical viewpoint in a brutally-candid manner. And needless to say, not everyone will agree with this viewpoint.

Instead of telling you everything I know about Objectivism (which is the philosophy of the story) and taking about 10 more pages of blog, read any of Ayn Rand's books if you're curious to know about it. You might like it and you might not. Do I consider myself to be an Objectivist? To a certain extent, yes. Morally, yes. However, I do not know enough about business or business ownership to determine which philosophies should be applied there. Neither do I have the knowledge to determine whether Objectivism could work on a nationwide/global-political scale. But I can say that Atlas Shrugged, the the embodiment of Objectivism, has changed my outlook on life. It has changed the way I think about human rights, fairness and equality, the ownership of ideas and work, and the meaning of life in general, as philosophies tend to do. It has contributed a great deal to my personal philosophy.

And on that note, I'm going to go read ten more pages of PassiveAggressiveNotes.com!
End of post!
THE END

Weekend Update

I know, it's been over a week since I've updated my blog! Well, I have been very busy most of the week, and the rest of the time, I admit, I've been hanging out with Jana.

Well, let's see... Last Sunday I was able to write 1000 words for my literature review, and then Monday and Tuesday I ran subjects in lab all day. Tuesday was my longest day, as I tacked on 3 and a half hours of data analysis with my adviser to discover from 20 raw scores that no hemispheric difference existed! It sucked, but we decided that Gabors may not be attentionally-demanding enough to produce differences-- either that, or we hadn't used the right design.

So we spent half the evening coming up with different experiments for the second part, and went home with nothing substantial. Adviser asked me to turn the results into d'prime just in case something turned up significant. d'prime shows a ratio for each person's scores for how many times they said they saw a Gabor when it was actually there, compared to how many times they said they saw a Gabor when it wasn't there. This is hits versus false alarms, just another measure for significant differences.

Well, I spent a large part of Wednesday doing that, and a good thing too-- because it looks like turning the scores into d'prime shows an effect! Again, not an effect of hemisphere, but an effect of set size-- let me explain.

In the original task I asked subjects to perform, they had to look at the center of a computer screen where a rapid stream of letters appeared. They had to pick out a white letter X among the stream of black letters, and then, sometime after the white letter appeared, a circle of 12 gabors appeared around the central letter stream. I think I've told you before that Gabors are funny little stripey-oval-things that are made up of different frequencies of the background color-- a luminance pattern, if you will-- here, I'll show a picture...



OK, that's not my picture-- but that's what the display looks like-- except for the letters in the corner, that just demonstrates that a white letter appears in the center among black letters. So Gabors are those things in the circle around the letter stream. And as you can see, there is an odd-one-out at an angle to the others. Not only did people have to quickly determine if the white letter that appears is an X, but they also have to pick out the odd-one-out.

If you split the circle of Gabors into slots of 3 (top 3, bottom 3, right 3, and left 3, total of 12), we only had the odd-one-out Gabor appear randomly in either the left or right 3 slots, to examine any effect of side (side differences equate hemispheric differences).

Well, odd-one-out detection does not require sophisticated search-- it just pops out at you. This is automatic feature detection. However, if the letter stream and circle of Gabors go by fast enough (80 milliseconds for each letter, and 80 milliseconds for the Gabor display), then the pop-out Gabor is harder to catch. This is an especially hard task if the Gabors appear at the exact same time as the white letter-- this is because you can't pay attention to 2 things at once, so when you're focusing on finding the white letter, you don't have time to disengage your attention to the periphery to see the pop-out Gabor. However, if the Gabors appear 800 milliseconds after the white letter, that gives your attention plenty of time to disengage from the white letter, and prepare yourself for pop-out detection.

So in my experiment, we only found this effect of time between white letter/Gabor onset. No effect for whether the Gabor appeared on the right side or the left side of the display, which is what we were hoping to find.

HOWEVER... After I ran subjects in the 12-Gabor condition, we thought it would be interesting to see if people showed attentional differences if there were only 6 Gabors on the screen ("set size" of 6). So for the last half of subjects, we took out the top and bottom 3 Gabors (which were just distractors, after all) and kept in the 3 slots on either side in which the odd-one-out could appear. Now this is interesting-- why should people show any difference in performance when the placement of the odd-one-out Gabor didn't change? All we did was remove some Gabors that subjects never even had to attend to.

Well! Using d'prime, we found that in the 6-Gabor task, people show a significantly smaller difference between correct hits and false alarms. Which means they were worse at correctly identifying a pop-out that was there, and/or they made more errors by indicating they saw a Gabor when it wasn't actually there, than in the 12-Gabor task.

How can this be? you may be asking! Since people are looking at fewer objects, shouldn't the 6-Gabor task be easier? Listen up-- here's how it goes-- when people have 12 Gabors, and 11 of them are all at the same angle, they look very unified, like they're all supposed to be at that angle. So when an odd-one-out shows up, it interrupts the perfect circle. But if there are only 6 Gabors, there are only 5 at the same angle, and an one odd-one-out makes the display look like a mess and less like an actual odd one among a uniform group. Thus, it is harder to spot. And that is what we found.

Yes! We found a big different in d'prime between the 12-Gabor and 6-Gabor set size. Hurray Hurray for us.

BUT- I STILL want to see some hemispheric differences! Which is why I'm excited to move on to phase 2-- the conjunction task.

You see, single features like Gabors can be seen as pop-outs-- they don't require sophisticated search. But if you combine features, and ask subjects to looks for a combination of features (called conjunctions), then the task depends on much greater attention!

Therefore, if we change the task so that the odd-one-out is a letter instead of a Gabor-- and letters are composed of different combinations of features (lines/etc.)-- then we should not only find an opposite effect of set size (conjunctions should be easier to spot in a set size of 6 because it is less to search through), but we should find hemispheric differences as well (because the right hemisphere is better at attention, and in this task, attention needs to really work hard).

So that's what I've been doing all week. Not only have we been planning the next phase of the experiment, but I'm also scrambling for participants to run a control next week (where they only have to look for the odd-one-out Gabor and ignore the letter stream-- which should be easy since they're not switching attention from one thing to another).

On top of that, I have to get "random experiment" for my course up and running. Yes, I'm still working on that. If you remember, I decided to study the effects of fantasy proneness on confusion of words and pictures. See, if people have to look at a series of words and pictures, I hypothesized that fantasy-prone individuals are more likely to forget what was a word and what was a picture. I was going to study hallucination-prone individuals, because all I wanted to do was replicate an experiment done using hallucinating and non-hallucinating schizophrenics, but with normal people. But I didn't have time to wait for the ethics to clear and apparently asking people if they've ever hallucinated is not the most ethical thing to do. So I went with fantasy-proneness instead, seeing as fantasy-proneness is highly correlated with hallucination-proneness, so my high-fantasy-prone people SHOULD also be hallucinators... I just can't ask them that.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. I've already analyzed the initial survey and I have made my groups of high- and low-fantasy-prone people. I just need to contact those people and create timeslots for them to come into the lab to run the actual experiment. First, I have to make sure the experiment I created in e-prime (a REALLY EASY computer program that puts timed visual stimuli together for you) works on HOC's lab computers. I will do that tomorrow. Then, after class, I will post the timeslots and hopefully get that experiment out of the way by the end of this week or next.

As for my poster for BPS, I have completely restructured it, and I'm happier with it now than I was. I was ABOUT to submit it-- I had one version in PDF format and everything-- but I couldn't bring myself to do it because I was ashamed of how it looked. So I had Jana go over it and she helped me change the color scheme/etc, and it looks SO much nicer now. I just have to change a FEW things here and there, and it'll be ready to print. I should be able to print it sometime next week.

Anyway, I'll end this post here-- I still have to talk about social things I've done this week, like how I went out to dinner with friends on my course, and I'm sure you want to hear about the hiking club, or what Jana and I have been up to outside of class, or anything that DOESN'T have to do with coursework. But unfortunately, you guessed it-- I'm doing COURSEWORK today-- I have 500 words left to write for my weekend quota, and I've got to get on it cos Jana wants to watch movies tonight.

So I will be sure to update on normal bits of life AFTER my 500 words is finished, and if I have time before Jana texts me: 'U come over, good time.'

Shoarly and the Hiking Club, Running through the Forest

Okay, I have a few things to talk about today:

First thing on my agenda is Thursday's class. This was the day we learned how to find lecturers/professors on academia.edu (kind of like an academic facebook), and researched different scientists on twitter/blogs/webpages/etc. It would have been a pretty fun task (and the lecture beforehand was engaging) if not for one thing: the so-called "mentoring" session this project turned out to be.

The HOC told us to find psychologists who interested us, preferably ones whose articles we'd been reading for our reviews/theses. Then, he said we would each give a short presentation about what we'd found. So when he said "work in pairs" I was slightly confused. Why should we work in pairs if we're each going to look up whoever interests us anyway, and our presentations have to be individual, as well?

I asked the question and got this response: "Think of working in pairs as a mentoring session, for those who may not understand the task."

What he meant, of course, were the foreign students.

All right, so let's get this clear-- as part of the course requirement, we have to learn how to analyze psychologists' webpages and create our own. The HOC wants us all to pass. The solution? Have the English-speakers do the work for the non-English speakers.

Actually, 2/3 non-English speakers did well finding researchers that interested them on their own. The one that didn't, of course, was my "partner". I spent 15 of the 30 minutes alloted to us probing this woman who obviously did not have any firm grasp of the language with questions such as, "Who have you been reading about?" "Which researchers interest you?" and "What are your research interests?" for even a place to start with this person. She couldn't name a single name, and finally muttered, "I don't look online for researchers." REALLY?

So I spent the last 15 minutes hurriedly finding TWO researchers and looking up all their webpages/personal accounts/etc. I let my "partner" copy one person's information word-for-word on notebook paper. When it came time to give our presentations, I obviously talked about the person I had found the most information on-- and made quite a good presentation, too, flipping from webpage to webpage, indicating the researcher's strengths and weaknesses in her online presence. My "partner" then stuttered through disjointed words such as "her", "Ba-ba-behr...mm.." and could not even form a complete sentence as I feverishly pointed at webpages for reference, which she promptly ignored. After she finally gave up, she whispered to me in her best English yet, "I was going to talk about the person you talked about."

OH REALLY? I let you copy my (needless to say) disorganized/bullet-point-like notes, and you think you could have made something of it? You didn't even ask what this researcher studies! This is one of my favorite psychologists and you have to gall to say you could have given any sort of coherent summary of the work I did on her, using the information I gave you. I think not.

So the "mentoring" service seemed to be a big waste of time ANYWAY and thankfully the rest of the class seemed to be on my side, and heatedly expressed their disdain for having to drag (some of) the foreigners along when they shouldn't even be on the course if they have such limited knowledge of English that they can't even do simple tasks-- this was after the HOC left, naturally.

Right, I just had to vent about that cos I didn't have a chance to do it on Thursday or Friday-- I've been so busy!

I was running subjects all day on Friday, and it was all just OK. One person showed up 10 minutes late for the study and threw everyone else off, one person stupidly quit out of the experiment because she "made a mistake" and had to start the block of trials ALL OVER AGAIN which she had the nerve to sigh exasperatedly about. Another girl WASTED my time trying prove she was a bloody genius by indicating she saw the Gabor every single trial when it only appears half the time-- had to throw out that participant completely for fudging so badly. And SHE had the nerve to give me this smile afterwards like "Aren't you going to tell me I did the best out of everyone?" NO! In fact, you scored worse that everyone-- you scored the worst in the history of my experiment, and I wish I could have told you that then to wipe that smirk off your face.

But in the end, I got the data I needed and got out of there. But it looks like dominant eye has nothing to do with which side people prefer on the task. So if it's not hemisphere, and it's not eye, then what is it? I've found a clear effect in my experiment where most people will show much better performance on one side over the other, but what side that is doesn't seem to be dependent on anything. There doesn't seem to be a pattern in the data other than "there is a dominant side for most people"-- but so far I can't figure out what that means, and there's no pattern for right-handers or dominant right-eyes, same goes for left. I e-mailed my adviser for advice on what to do next. I guess we shall see.

All righty, so this post is supposed to be about today's hike in Sherwood Forest! What can I say? It was an easy walk on dirt paths, no real hills or anything. It was raining most of the time, so we all got pretty wet-- which is a new experience for me since it hasn't rained on a hike this year until today. I was wearing my raincoat though, so I was dry on the inside.

Our first stop, of course, was the Major Oak-- one of the oldest trees in the forest and probably the oldest oak tree in the world-- over 1000 years old, it's estimated. If you would like to see a picture of it, I took one last time I saw it 2 years ago, so I'll post that for you here:



Eh, okay, not a very good picture, but if you want a better one, google it.

Anyway, the walk was nice-- I talked to a PhD student in economics and learned he studies decision theory!!! SO COOL. When he first told me he studies economics a few hikes ago, I was afraid it was going to be something boring, but he's actually collaborating with decision-making researchers in the psych. dept. for his thesis on individuals' over-confidence in financial decisions. Have I already said SO COOL? Maybe I'm just a nerd, but this is the kind of thing that fascinates me about statistics. How it's used to predict how people think-- and for the most part, stats can't really predict that because humans are irrational and do not follow logical models in coming up with the "best" solution to a problem.

He's the same person who recommended The Magician's Guild to me months ago, and I bought it, read half of it, and gave up 200 pages in when nothing seemed to be happening. Jana assured me this is how all sci-fi/fantasy novels are, and promptly read the whole series feverishly within a couple of days.

Maybe one day I'll pick it back up.

Maybe I'll ask this guy to coffee or something-- despite his poor taste in fiction, he's quite a pleasant person, and not to mention easy on the eyes. ;)

Well, now it's time to change gears for the last time before I end this post: my goals for the remainder of the weekend (which is to say, tomorrow).

1) To write 1000 words (to make up for having done no work today, seeing as I hiked). These 1000 words are going to encompass (a) the brain areas involved in perception, (b) the brain areas shared between perception and imagery (and areas involved in imagery that are not involved in perception), and (c) the brain areas involved in hallucinations and those shared areas with regards to perception and imagery.

2) That's it. If I can write my 1000 words on those things, I'll be good to go. I think I can. I think I can. In the words of Dwight and Ryan:

Dwight: Do you think you can handle it?
Ryan: Yeah, I think I can handle it.
Dwight: Do you think? Or do you know?
Ryan: I think.

Lazy Day

So today is going to be a lazy day, I can feel it! Went for a 1hr run this morning, didn't have my iPod so all was pretty quiet. Munched some cereal. Took a nice long shower just the way it's supposed to be. Now drinking my piping hot tea.

After the strenuous programming of yesterday, I'm almost in heaven-- yes, I helped program a task in a new version of MATLAB, learning along with my adviser as he became more and more frustrated by the "call functions" that are so different from the old version. We started from scratch at 11AM and worked until 6, and we're not even close to being done... but, I consider it all a learning experience, so if my eyes bleed from staring at a bright screen for 7 hours, then so be it!

Along the way, I told my adviser about my ideas for the coming summer. You see, there isn't any class over the summer, so I could just go home and write my thesis. But I want to keep running experiments to increase my chances of publication. So I talked about my ideas for visual deprivation studies-- I'd like to blindfold subjects and find out whether they experience hallucinations. Now that's already been done, but I'd like to add another group of subjects whom I will instruct to practice imagery tasks for a large part of the day, and see if they experience less hallucinations.

See, the reason people who are blindfolded hallucinate is because the visual areas of their brains suddenly lose a lot of stimulation, so those parts of the brain become over-excited and basically "reach out" for any kind of stimulation available-- and at that point, weird things happen, like hallucinations. I think, since imagery uses a lot of the same brain areas as visual perception, if people perform imagery tasks, it will exercise the visual areas of the brain and hallucinations will be reduced if not completely alleviated. There is SOME evidence that alludes to this--ish-- but no studies have looked at this directly, so I think that would be a good summer project.

And of course, if I can't find any subjects, I'll just do it on myself-- which I was planning on doing anyway. Yes, I am going to buy a pair of goggles, paint them black, and mosey around for a couple of days until I see hallucinations. I finally found a hallucinagenic that is completely harmless. GO ME! I read it takes a day or two, but I can wait. If I can roll around in a hungover stupor for 12 hours after drinking nutmeg tea, I can sit around for that log in the dark, waiting for visions to appear.

Why is this research important you may ask? Well, studies of blindfolding in normal people can help us to understand visual acuity loss in clinical populations. You see, anywhere from about 15-25% (and maybe even 40%) of people with visual degeneration will experience hallucinations. This is especially true in the elderly population, because people's eyes usually get worse after age 64. When there is a sudden loss of vision, visual areas of the brain become deprived, and there you have it, hallucinations. The stats may not be reliable-- as in, the percentage of hallucinators may actually be higher-- because people are reluctant to admit it when they are hallucinating. They're afraid people will think they're crazy. But really, visual deprivation hallucinations are the most normal hallucinations you can have, and if patients are told they're not crazy, it usually helps them to deal with their symptoms.

Anyway, that's all stuff I'm reading for my literature review-- which I've tailored now to focus on the relationship between perception, imagery, and hallucinations in the visually-deprived. My adviser might have been attracted to the idea of studying visual deprivation this summer, but we didn't have much time to talk about that since the goal of yesterday was to program that task.

I made sweet potato fries last night for dinner and they turned out perfect! I ate an entire monstrous sweet potato and felt like I'd done my gullet good the rest of the night for it.

I also had two great dreams last night: one involved the head of the course (HOC, remember)-- he told me my BPS poster was brilliant. He said the same thing in a dream a few weeks ago about my essays, and I got 90s on those, so I took this dream as a good sign. I also dreamed I went to the synaesthesia conference with Hannah, but Jana was also there, and she complained about having to take the bus as she always does he he he. However, I will be taking a train to this conference, not a bus-- I am more stylish than a bus.

On Monday, I went shopping for some conference clothes. I don't have anything in my wardrobe that is even close to "business casual" so on my list for that day was a pair of nice shoes, pants, and a blouse. Fours hours, a haircut, an electric shaver, and a pair of Clarks later, and I still had not found my blouse and pants. Most of the pants I tried on were too long, and when I found a pair that were short enough, they bunched weirdly in the back, as if they had been long but someone took them in badly in the buttcrack-area.

So... I will have to search for conference clothes another day. The conference isn't until next month, so I have time.

Today, my plan is to fill in the references on my BPS poster. And perhaps write a few words on hallucinations on visual deprivation. Maybe write a little of the introduction to the random experiment I haven't even got ethics approval for yet. We'll see how ambitious I am today, but I get the feeling I'm not going to be doing much more than those references.

Lazy day!

Amazing day.

I just found out one of my best friends graduated and became a professor and I just cried and cried cos he never told me cos he doesn't talk to me anymore since he got a girlfriend.

Weekend Plan

What I need to do: write 1000 words of literature review. Code Gabors into MATLAB. Add references to poster and make it more bullet-point-like. If I have time-- add some study info to fake PhD studentship proposal.
Time break-up:

Friday: Code in MatLab. Change up poster.
Saturday: write 500 words of literature review.
Sunday: write 500 words of literature review. If wrote more than expected on Saturday, add info to PhD proposal.

There, that doesn't sound like too bad of a plan, eh? Here's to a productive weekend.

Accomplished today: finished my e-prime experiment design! I can start the study as soon as it has ethics approval.

Plan for next week:
Monday: free morning! do some work! class in the afternoon.
Tuesday: re-write attentional blink experiment with adviser in the other lab room, and put finishing touching on the AB final experiment.
Wednesday: free day! do some work!
Thursday: class
Friday: participants coming in from 9-1 for attentional blink pilot.

Wow, I went from being so clever to so BORING in one day.

But you know this blog is a diary and a planner. Today is just a planner day.

I Hijacked a Tree and this is My Story

Something happens to you when you've stared at a computer screen for about 12 hours straight. You go a little wonky, and your daydreams just get weird. Am I addicted to the computer? Yes. Yes I am. In all fairness, I was doing work the first half of the day, but then afternoon was spent looking up hotels for a synaesthesia conference next month.

That's right-- it was something a classmate of mine found advertized on facebook and she asked "Want to go?" I said, "Sure," and that was that. Now we're going on a two-and-a-half day pilgrimage to east London this March, neither of us synaesthetes or synaesthists, but both of us wild for the impossible, extraordinary, perplexing, and altogether STRANGE workings of the human brain.

Synaesthesia, if you don't know, is a spring for creative genius, an unbridled vibrancy of perception, in which the fortunate "sufferer" is able to fuse two or more senses to encode external stimuli that the perceptually-limited (like ourselves) will encode using only one. To put it another way, some synaesthetes can see sounds, others can taste words, still others can categorize numbers by color.

In short, it is bizarre, and it is awesome. And we are going to take a crash course in the most current research about it just because.

The third trimester of my day was spent watching "Charlie bit my finger", Dan Quayle bloopers, and looking up the wikipedia page on the Amish. Wow. Literally going on 12 hours here. At the pub quiz yesterday, one girl remarked that her eyes wigged out after three hours on the compy and that was the longest she could go at once. I have her beat times four, and I'm still going strong.

Oh, and speaking of the hiking club (oh, I didn't mention them, did I? They're the usual group at the pub quiz, anyway)-- I won a new pair of hiking boots! Yippee! A sports-retailer offered to let 2 members of our club review a brand new boot design, and I became one of the lucky draws. So now I will have 2 pairs of hiking boots and a pair of hiking trainers, and at the rate I'm going I'll soon have more shoes than hikes under my belt. It just happened, OK?

I also have 2 toasters, I REALLY don't know how that happened...

Just kidding, I don't really have 2 toasters. I own one toaster, and my roommate decided it was crappy and brought one from home the last time she visited her parents. Oh, so Jana, if you're reading this, I'll let you buy my toaster from me. Good price. Very cheap. No tricks. You buy.

So my goal for this weekend stands the same as last week-- to write one thousand words of my literature review.

I don't feel like going into all the amazing accomplishments I've made this week, mostly because I didn't make any, I was too busy laughing at "piano cat" and eating Frosted Mini Spooners (Malt-o-Meal TM), complements to my mother for shipping my favorite cereal all the way from cozy Streetsboro, over the sharks, and the seaweed, and the Titanic, to here.

Also today, I was very excited to receive a Valentine's Day present from my mom-- YES my MOTHER is my valentine, got something to say about it? ;)
The card is looking at me right now with it's cute gushy pink polka dots and stick-on heart-shaped jewel stuck in the middle of the first "O" of "XOXO". She also sent a Symphony bar, which is probably the most amazing mass-produced candy bar the US makes. Very specific, I know, but I have to be careful about my chocolate-- the Swiss, of course, have us beat.

Oh, moving on to the title of this post, I did not choose it simply as an eye-catcher-- I had a very vivid daydream about driving cross country from Washington to the Midwest with a hacked up pine tree in my backseat and Obi on the passenger side. I think it means I need to take him with me on my subsequent US journeys, and, I need to satisfy my lust for damp, barky, green, chilly, sluggy old western Washington state.

The English do not have monster slugs, by the way. You'd think they would because the climate suits slugs so well. But alas, the slugs are Ohio-sized.

Let me tell you Midwesterners about the Washingtonian slug.

Better yet, let me show you a picture I stole off the internet.



First, this picture WAS to scale but the slug was too big for my blog.

Second, let you all remember that the first picture I ever embedded into my blog was a picture of a banana slug.

Third, look at the size of that thing!

If you're thinking, "Well, that's just an extreme example-- this is a mutant slug"-- then, you're wrong. Here's a factoid stolen now from Wikipedia:

The Pacific banana slug is the second-largest species of terrestrial slug in the world, growing up to 25 centimetres (9.8 in) long, and weights of 115 gram (4 oz).

And here's a real intruiging finding:

Banana slugs can move at 6 ½ inches (16.5 cm) per minute.

Whoa! No way! I pride myself in knowing I'm faster than that. I've one-upped the slug. At least I think so, I don't know how many inches I can go per minute. Most likely more than 6 1/2 but you never know.

By the way, ask me about the banana slug folk songs sometime, not even lying.

GOAL!

Welp, I got my ethics and one-thousand words done and it's only Saturday! There's nothing like an easy goal to BOOST morale! You just wait for this literature review. It is genius. My analytical powers even amaze ME. The number of insights I have in just one paper is astonishing. I am so humble about all of it, too!

So now I am either over or almost halfway through, depending on the word count I am striving for. The thing has to be between 6-8000 words, so if I'm shooting for the lower end then I'm almost done! But I have so much left to talk about I'm wondering if even 8000 is gonna do it. We'll see though-- I often overestimate how much I'm able to write-- combine that with being incredibly lazy and I think I'll end up with a moderate 7,923 word count. You hold me to that.

So, do I play the rest of the weekend? I was unfortunately too late to sign up for the hike tomorrow, and there are so many people ahead of me on the reserve list that it's impractical to think I will be contacted. Then again, if I suit up in my hiking kit and show up tomorrow ANYWAY, in case someone DOESN'T show up, I will be the convenience choice.

It's only fair, I think. I might be cheeky and just do it.

I think I'll go drool at Youtube now. Nothing beats killing time like Youtube! Unless of course, you count tetris.

PEACE

Short Entry

OK this is going to be a short one, I promise-- and you want to know why? Because I didn't do much work all last week and have nothing really to show for it except the realization that my soul is androgynous and reaching level 9 in tetris.

All right, I did do SOME work... I'm basically done with my BPS poster (just need references) so that should be ready to print once I get the HOC's approval. I also remodeled my lit review idea (see, I told you I would). It is not simply on the relationship between imagery and perception now, but the relationship between imagery, perception, and hallucinations. You may not think that makes a big difference, but it completely restructures the point of the paper. As for writing? I'm over 2100 words now, with half a handwritten page to add to that, so about 2200/6000 words. Not much considering I was at 1700 before. Need to write this weekend.

My "random experiment" is partially programmed in e-prime, and I need to apply for ethics approval (will also do that tomorrow). I've scrapped earlier ideas for my fake PhD studentship proposal and am now going with something I might be able to get help from Dr Barrett on, a.k.a., something that has to do with visual attention. Also, I got 5/30 research participation credits since last week. So this week was semi-productive.

My goals for this weekend are as follows:
Make a REAL structured outline for fake PhD studentship
Write at least 1000 words on normal imagery/hallucinations, and brain areas involved in both.
Submit ethics for random experiment.

Those are realistic goals, right?

Anyway, enough about work. On to fun!

My dad sent me a book called Journey of Souls which was written by a clinical psychologist/hypnotherapist specializing in LBL (life beyond lives) regression. LBL is basically that period between death and reincarnation -- for those of you who believe in both a) the soul and b) reincarnation, it is a collection of 29 case studies where all the patients talk about going to a heaven-esque location and being with their spiritual friends.

It is actually a very interesting concept: The body dies, and depending on the soul's maturity level, it could linger for a while to see what happens, or whiz right away through the astral plane. Young souls are apprehensive to follow the magnetic force that seems to pull them toward the spirit world, and need their guides/spiritual family to comfort them immediately. Old souls are the relaxed veterans, needing nobody to tell them what's what and simply speeding along the magnetic line to their destination.

Souls live in groups, made up of others who are spiritually resonant, or on the same maturity level as the rest of the group. Younger souls study all their past lives and talk about the lessons they have learned and hope to learn in the next life. Older souls act as teachers to the young ones-- even older than them are the guides for the recently body-shed, and the oldest act as something like judges and overseers and rarely reincarnate anymore.

Anyway, the book paints a really interesting picture, and I would like to read a fantasy novel based on these cases, where one soul is the main character and goes through all this soul stuff in a couple of volumes-- it would be cool to see all the incarnations it chooses, and it's relationship to its friends, etc.

Oo, it's 8 o'clock! I'm gonna grab me a bowl of cereal before I've deemed it too late to eat.

Then tetris! WOOHOO