science

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January 16, 2010

Headlines From Psychology, Part 1

Posted by Nathen under advice, babies, decisions, headlines, normalcy, psycholinguistics, psychology, psychopathology, school, science, sleep
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Going though my undergraduate degree in psychology, I was often surprised about information that was well known by the field that should have hit the headlines but never made a dent. In the end it was one of my reasons for going into therapy instead of experimental psychology. At one point I asked my social psychology teacher for an example of basic social psych research that had had a real impact on mainstream society. He could not give me one. I know that basic research is done to find stuff out, not to directly help people, and I support that. I also know that psychology is a baby science, and tackling a very complex set of phenomena, and doing a pretty good job. Still, I was disappointed. It is too bad, because a lot of useful and sometimes very important stuff has been discovered by experimental psychologists, and it is mostly just ignored.

Here are a few things I came across in my classes and reading that I thought should have been mainstream headlines. If you are interested in references, leave a comment and I will get them to you.

It Is Important to Talk to Your Baby, Even in the Womb: Your baby can hear and recognize your voice in your womb, is already learning your language, and wants to hear your voice.

It Is Important to Sleep With Your Baby: Babies are not born fully self-regulating. One way this shows up is that babies do not breath out enough carbon dioxide–sleeping with parents provides them with a pool of carbon dioxide that keeps the baby breathing deeply enough. Another benefit is that their 90 minute hunger cycle (waking and nursing each 90 minutes) helps establish their 90 minute REM sleep cycle, which they are not born with, and also keeps them from getting into deep, delta wave sleep, which is dangerous for babies because they can stop breathing.

Don’t Worry Too Much About Your Decisions: Your brain has mechanisms to ensure that you will think you made the right decision, regardless of what you decide. This can be undermined, however, by thinking of reasons for your decision before you make it. In many cases, your coming-up-with-reasons ability can get in the way of your decision-making ability. As long as you get all the relevant information, you may have a better chance making a good decision without deliberation.

It Works to Ask People to Watch Your Stuff: People who you do not specifically ask to watch your stuff will do nothing while your stuff is stolen. People who you do ask, will go to great lengths to keep your stuff from being stolen.

The Normal Are Not Detectably Sane: The methods of this study were not well laid out, so I do not know how strong this evidence is, but it was quite clever. Normal people got admitted into mental hospitals by saying they had heard a voice say the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Other than that they behaved as usual. None were discovered to be sane by the staff, no matter how long they stayed hospitalized.

 

July 25, 2009

A Good Idea: Journals of Null and Replicated Results

Posted by Nathen under ideas, psychology, rants, science, Sean Laurent
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I’m listening to a great Long Now Seminar by Nassim Taleb about probability in complex systems and it reminded me of a great idea. Nassim gives only what he calls “negative advice,” meaning advice about what not to do. He considers positive advice useless and laments that it’s so hard to find books called Ten Ways to Screw Up Your Life, or How I Lost a Million Dollars, compared to stuff like Ten Steps to Success.

There is a related publishing problem in psychology, and perhaps other sciences: If your idea doesn’t work out, you can’t get it published. Journals do not want to publish failed experiments. They just aren’t sexy. The problem is, at a typical alpha of .05, one in twenty experimental results will be flukes—just random happenings, not reliable, not indicative of anything real going on. Even with a more rigorous alpha of .01, you will get a false positive every 100 experiments you run, on average.

Research psychologists know this. They get a lot of training in statistics. They do not feel certain about their own results until the results have been replicated in other labs. But they rely on what is published for their input. For my honors thesis, for example, I was interested in how the effects of having power over others compares to having power over yourself.  So I read the literature on power and designed my experiment first to replicate the results of two experiments from a famous  paper which showed evidence for social power inhibiting perspective taking, and then to extend that research a little, by adding a “personal power” condition. Almost every paper on power mentions that social power inhibits perspective taking, and they all cite this famous paper to back them up. The author is prolific and well-respected, and rightfully so. He does really creative, interesting work.

Despite my considerable efforts to duplicate his methods, however, I replicated none of his results. “These are the flattest data I’ve ever seen,” said Sean, my advisor. That was a problem for my honors thesis, because the question I wanted to look at never came up—I had nothing to compare my personal power numbers to. I had a conversation with this famous psychologist later and found out that he had not been able to replicate his results either. Now flat data is not a problem for science; every researcher I’ve talked to about it has said something like, “Hmm! It didn’t replicate, huh? That’s really interesting!” The problem is, that information was already out there and I couldn’t get to it. This scientist knew about the problem, but I didn’t. Now I know about it, but no one outside of my lab will know, because no one will publish it. The next person who has my idea will make the same mistake, and the next.

The solution:

First, an idea either stolen or adapted from my advisor, a high quality psychology journal called Null Results in Psychology, with a mission to publish peer reviewed failures. It might be an online-only journal, because it would need to be big. If such a thing had existed a year ago, I could have run a standard check and saved myself a lot of trouble.

Second, another journal called Replicated Results in Psychology, which would be for publishing peer reviewed, successful replications of previous research. Or perhaps these two could be combined into one. It doesn’t matter.

Third, both of these journals could be attached to a database that compiled and cross-referenced replications and failed replications. Ideally, the strength of a theory or evidence is based on how well it predicts the future. In practice, however, this is only partly the case, and turns out to be true only in the long run. The weight carried by a theory or evidence has at least as much to do with the fame of the scientist who produced it. Everyone is waiting for and immediately reads their new stuff. There is a database which records how often a paper is cited, but the number of citations tells you only the relative fame of that paper. It doesn’t say whether the citations are supportive or critical. And most citations are not either—they are used to support the author’s thinking.

Easy access to null results, replicated results, and a database linking it all together could change the direction and the pace of progress in psychology. It could also make learning psychology more interesting. My professors were mostly very good about not just teaching theories. They presented (and had me memorize) the experimental methods and evidence that led to the formulation of the theories. Even so, I often wondered how soon and in what way these theories would seem quaint, like phlogiston or “the ether”–early evidence supported these ideas, too, after all.  I would have loved it if evidence could have been presented like, “OK, we’re starting to feel pretty good about these results, because these variations have been tried by 30 different labs, and 25 of them found the same thing.” I can imagine the groans of my fellow students and the cheers of my professors, which makes me think it’s a good idea.

 

July 17, 2009

The Five Rabbit Holes of Abstinence Diets and My Advice About Eating

Posted by Nathen under abstinence, ethics, food, rants, raw foodism, science, veganism, vegetarianism
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I wrote this essay for myself, two years ago, a spin-off of and companion piece to my paper on why people become vegetarian. It was the culmination of a lot of thinking and reading and trying different ways of eating. I like it but you may not, especially if you are on an abstinence diet right now. That may be because you are, like many vegetarians I’ve met, not like me: not driven to take things all the way, not terribly annoyed by things that don’t quite add up. Bless you. I might look down on you a little for what seems like lack of intellectual rigor, but mostly I’m envious of your relaxed way of being in the world. It sounds nice. I don’t recommend that you read this. Read something fun instead. On the other hand, you may be like me, an agnostic who found religion in a diet, ready to get uptight when someone tells me I might not actually be saved. I don’t recommend you read this, either, unless some part of you is dissatisfied with your religion and you are ready for some discomfort. For everyone else, or if you plan to read on anyway, or if you are a stickler for references, I recommend you also read “Vegetarianism and Reason” for context—personal, historical, demographic—and a good bibliography.

When I was in college in the San Francisco Bay area in my twenties, a close friend asked me how she could lose weight. Maybe it was because I was, as I always have been, such a slender person. At the time I thought it was because I’d read more about nutrition and diets than most people. My advice was, “Stop eating meat and dairy products.” I said that with confidence both that she could do it and that it would resolve any problems with she had with her body. I’d been vegan for a year or two and vegetarian for several years before that, was in great health, and never had the slightest problem maintaining those diets. My housemate, who’d overheard the conversation, was incredulous: “Why didn’t you suggest something that normal people are capable of, like cutting back on snacking?” That kind of advice had not occurred to me. I knew the answer and gave it to her. These days I’m much more circumspect. I know a lot more about nutrition and diets now than I did then, but am a lot less confident about that knowledge.

Abstinence diets and arguments

An abstinence diet is a way of eating that is defined by what you don’t eat. There are many varieties of this way of eating, but the arguments for engaging in them fall into two basic categories: ethical or ‘spiritual’ arguments, and health or ‘science’ arguments. Most Americans who stop eating meat, for example, do so because they believe they will be healthier, while most vegans do not consume or use animal products on ethical grounds. My own path was the opposite, but I followed the same two lines of thought: I became vegetarian on ethical grounds and vegan (and for several weeks ate only raw food) for health reasons. These two basic tracks led me, perhaps a little too neatly, to what I’ve come to see as my five rabbit holes—thought processes and behaviors that cannot be followed all the way.

The ethical track

While the health/‘science’ track has its own rabbit holes, genuine health-based arguments do not lead to vegetarianism or veganism. I do believe that a vegetarian or vegan diet with plenty of variety is miles better than the standard American donut-coffee-burger-fries-Coke diet, but read any of the thoughtful writers on the subject—Robbins, for example, in Diet for a New America—and you will see that the health-based arguments are really advocating a plant-based diet, not abstinence from meat. Ethical arguments, on the other hand, do lead, seamless and compelling, to vegetarianism and veganism. (Check out Fox’s Deep Vegetarianism, for a great example.) The problem is you cannot follow them all the way.

Rabbit hole #1: Non-violence

On the ethical track, you base your diet on the principle of non-violence. When you become an ethical vegetarian, it is because you have realized that animals are not all that different from humans, and decided that their suffering is important. In a way, you have been able to identify with and have compassion for all animals, instead of just humans. The next step is to see that any product that comes from an animal requires that animal to be coerced and caged. It no longer has freedom. When you come to identify with animals enough to condemn their slavery as well as their slaughter, you become an ethical vegan.

Not many people stay vegan for long. It’s hard to do, for many reasons. To do so requires a hard core dedication to a nonviolent lifestyle. By this point, your ethical thinking has gone beyond animals. You are concerned about the life of the planet, for example: You probably wash out and reuse plastic bags (if you use them at all), you bike when other people would drive, you start hopping freights for longer trips, or guilt trip yourself if you don’t. You probably get interested in libertarian philosophies like anarchism and compassion-based philosophies like Buddhism. This is no longer just a way of eating.

If you are one of these serious ethical vegans, you start to hear about the next step, fruitarianism. Chances are, you are not a serious ethical vegan, so this may seem like a huge, untenable leap. It is a leap that vegans usually do not make, either, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute, but it is something they will consider.

Most of us have inherited the “knowledge” that plants and animals exist on separate ethical continua. It’s easy and intuitive to think that way, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to argue: Plants behave radically different than we do. They move extremely slowly. They don’t seem to have emotions and they don’t even seem to feel sensations like we do. True, but animals also behave differently than we do, so this is a matter of degree. Does something being different from you mean you can kill it? If you are really serious about compassion, use this argument with great caution. It has been used to justify such evils as genocide, racism, sexism, and meat-eating. But we grow them. They exist in their current form because of us. Pretty weak. The same can be said of cows and slaves.

And so on.

We are probably right to think that the plants in our garden do not suffer the way animals suffer, but that does not mean that the death and mutilation of the plants that provide us with root, leaf, stem and flower foods are not a form of violence. The ethics of eating seeds is dubious, too, from that standpoint. We grind or chew them up and they are no longer able to serve their purpose of propagation. The only parts of plants that have been designed for eating are fruits. They are often brightly colored to attract our attention. They are often sweet. They are nutritious. This is all supposedly so that animals will eat the fruit and inadvertently spread the seeds. A true fruitarian eats only fruit that has fallen off of its parent plant. (I do not know if they also try to poop in useful places. They really should.) There are people who eat a fruitarian diet, too, though their numbers are so small (and presumably the time spent on the diet is so short) that the evidence for its efficacy is sparse and anecdotal. So, unless you try and love the fruitarian diet, your easy, morally convicted choices have been taken from you and you are left with a continuum of diet choices to make based on your level of comfort with violence to various creatures.

Rabbit hole #2: Transcendence

This is the “spiritual” or “ascetic” rabbit hole. I believe that many eating disorder based abstinence diets fall into this category, but look up orthorexia if you are interested in that. I’m more familiar with the diets based on the ascending spiritual tradition—most likely a misunderstanding of that tradition.

The basic idea is that human beings are perhaps part animal, but divine, immortal, non-material beings at our core, and that our job is twofold: Use meditation practices to strengthen our spiritual self, increasing our awareness and compassion until they extend to the entire universe, and at the same time, subdue our animal nature using such disciplines as celibacy and fasting.  Abstinence diets from vegetarianism all the way through to fruitarianism are quite appealing from this standpoint. They seem like permanent fasts, but come along with the promise of great health. The problem is, until you die, there is always somewhere purer to go, and fruitarianism is not the end of the line. There is also breatharianism, where you live on air and sunshine alone. I have never met a breatharian, but I’ve read about and heard of a few, including one in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. If you are on this track, consider that the Buddha went before you and then decided on the Middle Way. Be kind to your body and skip the asceticism!

The health track—Rabbit hole #3: Information overload

There are two major health and science related rabbit holes. The first has to do with information. There is so much ‘information’ out there about diet and human digestion! Most of it is pure metaphysics–assertions of Truth with only passionate belief to back it up. And metaphysics aside, without the blinkers of ethics it is very, very difficult to find an uncontested assertion about what foods are best to eat. If you dive in deep, the density and spin are quickly overwhelming. And that’s just at the macro-level, talking about stuff like apples and pooping. Human health also happens at the level of the quadrillions of chemical reactions that happen in your body every second, the way those reactions act as nodes in networks, and the networks of networks that emerge in the process. Vast amounts have been written in scholarly journals about it and we are still so far from figuring it all out. Furthermore, the folks at university labs studying intracellular protein transport and stuff like that are far removed from the questions you and I have about diet. They probably eat at McDonalds on their lunch break and don’t think twice about it.

Then there’s the question of human biochemical individuality. Are there foods that are good for me but bad for you? Probably, but this makes finding the ideal diet for you even more difficult and makes it less likely that a simple abstinence diet like veganism will be the answer.

Rabbit hole #4: The Fall

The second health and ‘science’ (read ‘metaphysics’) related rabbit hole is based on theories of human evolution. Veganism seems to be the jumping off spot for a huge number of diets. If you are vegan and still frustrated by ill health or low energy, what do you do? You will come across a diet whose argument is basically the myth of the Fall: “We were doing great until….” Raw foodism, which tends to mean “raw veganism,” is the most popular of these, maybe because it throws veganism a bone: You’ve got it all right except that you are destroying the nutrients in your food by heating it up! And, according to the format, all of humanity was doing great until we started using fire. Then, if the now raw vegan still feels bad, they may continue looking and come across the information that there is no evidence of any indigenous people who didn’t consume animal protein. It makes sense, now, that if you were an early human and came across a bird’s nest or frog or whatever, you would take advantage of that concentrated source of protein! This brings us to the multitude of what to the uninitiated seem like crazy diets, including Paleolithic (wild, raw plants and animals), Anopsology (anything raw except dairy + other rules), Essene (raw dairy and plants), Primal (raw meat, dairy and plants) and Traditional (only unprocessed foods, mostly raw, with raw meat and lots of raw dairy). Some of these diets include eating animal feces, too—raw, of course—and intentionally rotting the (raw) meat before eating it. This all makes perfect sense from the right jumping off spot! I’ve been there. I still have some interest in trying the Essene diet and I’m fascinated with some aspects of Anopsology, but I have yet to try them. They are so elaborate that it’s hard to imagine having, simultaneously, the money and the social support required to maintain them.

So, where does this leave us?—Rabbit hole #5: Epistemology

What can you really know about the food we eat and its effect on our body? We know what we have read about it. We know what has been said to us. Those paths lead us to the other rabbit holes. We also know, though, what foods we have actually eaten, what they looked, smelled and tasted like, and how we felt before and after eating them. Shouldn’t that, over the years, add up to a lot of perfectly legitimate and applicable information? Can’t you observe yourself like a science experiment?

Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with that. First, there is no control group. In order to know the actual effects of the experiment, you need to be able to see what you would have felt like had you not eaten that slice of cheese or whatever. The subtleties of human sensation render our “experiments” dubious at best. You may find that every time you eat that slice of cheese you throw up. That’s pretty clear; you should probably stop eating that cheese. Unless, of course, you ate the cheese with other foods and you can’t really be sure it was the cheese and not the pickle, or maybe the combination of the cheese and the pickle, or maybe you just were trying to eat too early in the morning or late at night, or maybe it was because it was the cheese you always ate with your ex-girlfriend…. That gets to the second problem with our experiment, and probably the most important. How can you separate your physiological responses to foods from your psychological responses? They have the same feedback mechanisms: sensation. Do you feel good because the ice cream reminds you of nursing as an infant or because that ice cream is benefiting your body? Or because you are a sugar addict, getting your fix? Or is it because humans evolved a craving for sweetness and fat to survive in a calorie-scarce environment?

I’m sorry to say that you can’t know. You really can’t.

I’m assuming that if you’ve read this far, you are involved enough in this debate that is obvious to you that eating from your local food coop is better for you than from McDonalds, that turnips are better for you than twinkies, that eating a variety of foods is better for you than just a few, and that eating in ways that make you remarkably fat or thin are probably not good ideas. This is for you. This is the only advice I can give that I am completely confident of concerning diet: You can’t know what the best way for you to eat is. You have to guess. But when you guess and while you are guessing, you can also feel happy, comfortable, excited and flexible about your guesses and the fact that you are guessing. And, more important, enjoy your food! Savor how it looks and smells and tastes and feels in your mouth and stomach. Love your food and love your body every moment that they are interacting.

Thanks to my editors, Ce Rosenow, Grace Llewellyn, Joseph Kwiatkowski, and Reanna Alder.

 

June 12, 2009

Honors Thesis Posted

Posted by Nathen under honors project, perspective taking, power, psycholinguistics, psychology, questions, school, science, writing
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I just posted the last two papers of my undergraduate career: my honors thesis, “Differentiating the Effects of Social and Personal Power,” and my research project for Psycholinguistics, “The Relationship between Clarity of Enunciation and Idea Density.” They are under ‘writing,’ which is under ‘out’ in my sidebar.

I don’t recommend reading them unless you are a researching these topics (in which case, I do recommend reading them). If you’re not used to scholarly writing, just read the abstracts–the first paragraphs. They tell you everything you need to know. It’s kind of funny that I just worked really hard for over a year on something that almost no one will be interested in reading. It was an astounding amount of work, comparable to making a record, from songwriting and rehearsing to mastering. And a lot more work than some records. This was not a punk record.

Well, since I just said not to read it after I’ve been posting about it for months, I guess I should at least summarize it. Here we go:

Social power is power over other people. Any kind of power. There is a lot of research on what having social power does to you, and it’s mostly bad: more stereotyping, less perspective taking, seeing others as a means to your ends etc. It’s the kind of stuff that might keep powerful people in power. Reading this stuff is pretty alarming for a feminist like me. It’s way more complicated than that, of course, but you’re getting the super short version here.

Personal power is power over yourself. There hasn’t been much research on its effects, just enough to suggest that it’s what people really want when they are struggling for power over each other, the real goal is self-governance.

I tried to test whether personal power has similar or different effects on perspective taking than social power. I was not able to do that, for complicated reasons. I was, however, able to find evidence that people consider personal power a broader category than social power. That is, you can sink to greater depths and rise to higher heights of personal power than you can social power. Second, I found that without a salient reminder of personal power, people did not make a distinction between social and personal power. That’s pretty interesting, because if people are out there trying to claw their way up the hierarchy, it may just be because they haven’t made the distinction between what they probably really want–personal power–and what they are working for–social power.

That may seem intuitive and like “why would you want to spend a year finding evidence for something so obvious?” but for a scientist, coming across something that seems obvious that hasn’t been tested is a gold mine. All kinds of obvious things have turned out to not be true. That’s one cool thing about psychology–it’s a baby science, so those unlooked-at areas are all over the place. There is only one other scientist that I’m aware of that’s looking into this subject too, Marius Van Dijke, in the Netherlands. Luckily, he’s got resources and will likely have much more traction on it than I could as an undergrad with one year to work and a $100 budget.

 

June 11, 2009

I Am About to Go Off Gluten

Posted by Nathen under charting my life, food, science, stress
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I stopped eating wheat for a few years in the mid-90s. I had been getting sick a lot and a doctor recommended I give it a try, postulating an allergy. I immediately stopped getting sick. It was great. I was happy. I must have had an allergy, right? The thing is, I didn’t start getting sick again when I started eating wheat again. And, around the time I went back on wheat, I got skin-tested for food allergies and wheat did not show up. Did this mean I never had an allergy? That it had been a coincidence that I had stopped getting sick? That I had an allergy that didn’t show up because my tissues had been clean for so long? That I had an allergy and skin tests are no good? That I used to have an allergy and I had grown out of it? Food sensitivity, I have decided, along with most food-related ideas, is a murky domain, and I’m sorry to say that looking into the opinions of experts has not been helpful.

The idea I developed at the time, and still believe to some degree, is that I do have some kind of sensitivity to wheat that may or may not be an allergy (whenever that term finally gets a good definition), and that surfaces during times of stress, like rocks when the tide goes out. I don’t have much evidence for this. Just that the story I presented above happened during a stressful few years of my life, and that wheat seems to be one of the three foods (along with red meat and sugar) that I get clear “you just overdid it” signs from my body: If I eat a lot of white bread, I can count on getting a little irritated in the back of my throat and feeling a bit…yucky, I guess, is the technical term.

I have some evidence against my idea, too. First, no noticeable reactions to moderate amounts of wheat. A true Celiac, for example, will be extremely uncomfortable for days after eating any wheat, rye, or barley–bloating, diarrea, various symptoms. Also, by far the most stressful period of my life was a few years ago, and I ate wheat through it and barely ever got sick.

Anyway, I have this idea, and I’ve been thinking about this set of symptoms I have. I’m not sick, but not being sick is not good enough, you know? I have these symptoms: 1) I have dandruff. Dandruff is an inflammatory reaction to a kind of yeast that lives in our scalps. 2) I’ve been having some pain in my joints and tendons, mostly in my hands, feet, and low back. Joint pain is often associated with inflammation. 3) I have what a urologist called epididymitis, inflammation of an epididymis, which feels like a slightly achy testicle. 4) I’m itchy. Couldn’t that have something to do with inflammation?

As you may have guessed, I’ve come up with a hypothesis, the Nathen Has Low-Grade Systemic Inflammation Hypothesis. NHLGSIH, for short.

I’ve also come up with a plan that sounds really fun, starting this weekend and going through to my birthday, at the end of September. Part of it is going off gluten (or, strictly, gliadin, the molecule in the protein complex that is called ‘gluten’ and that is in the gluten of wheat, rye, and barley, and that seems to be the problematic element) because of my food sensitivity idea–maybe I’m reacting to it at a low level and I’d be better off without it. Part of it is supplementation: anti-inflammatories (fish oil and turmeric, mostly) and bioflavanoids (picnogenol and grape pips, mostly). I can honestly say that I’ve never felt a clear benefit from a supplement, but what the heck, I’m giving it a try.

I’ll be watching for a clear improvement in any of my easily trackable symptoms (pains, dandruff) by my birthday. It would be nice to experience obvious changes, but I’m skeptical. Inflammation is another murky topic. It’s a very, very complex part of our immune response, involving a bunch of hormones and chemical cascades. No doubt in a hundred years inflammation as we know it will seem very quaint, along with balancing the humors. Anyway, without obvious improvement, I’ll go back to the good, crusty breads and not reading labels.

There are several weaknesses in my methodology. First, no control group. I need a second Nathen to eat gluten all summer but otherwise do exactly what I’m doing. Second, these are not the only diet changes I’m making. I’m also going off sugar and pretty much all other processed foods. I’m also going to be eating 50-70% raw food, by volume. I’m taking glucosamine, MSM, and chondroitin. I’m also going to start eating protein three times a day. Third, there are the lifestyle changes. I’m moving. I’m not going to school. I’m not going to be reading/computing/stressing as much. I’m going to be excercising a lot more. And meditating. I’m going to be making music. I’m not going to be dancing as much. I’ll still dance every day, but I’m not planning to do any camps or exchanges until December.

So it’s not even a very good quasi-experiment. But I’m so looking forward to it! I love changing up my diet. I get so much more creative about what I eat. I’m looking forward to my summer, in general. I’m going to stay in Eugene for most of it, which is unusual for me even though it’s my favorite time of year here. I’m going to relax. I’m going to eat some great food.

 

May 7, 2009

An Important Lexical Retrieval Variable

Posted by Nathen under psycholinguistics, psychology, science, social cognition lab, talking
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I just read about two studies that found that humanities lecturers use more filled pauses–time saying ‘uh,’ ‘um,’ etc–than science lecturers, and that it’s probably because the humanities have more synonyms to draw upon. In science, it is very useful in conversation to have very precise, technical definitions of each word that everyone agrees upon. Empathy, for example, cannot mean or connote compassion in psychological discourse, and if it does, you run into problems.

Maybe that’s why the people in my social cognition lab (can) talk so fast. They all understand precisely each word, so ideas can come and go very rapidly. Still too rapidly for me to understand, sometimes.

 

April 25, 2009

Year 38 Goals, Midway Update

Posted by Nathen under Abandon Ship, African dance, Balboa, ballet, blogging, celibacy, cooking, Damian Lester, dancing, Darlene Lester, David Waingarten, goals/intentions, Grace Llewellyn, graduate school, honors project, Karly Barrett, lists, Maya, meditation, mindfulness, practicum, psychology, questions, Reanna, record production, school, science, sleep, songwriting, stress, Zen Zenith
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I am a few weeks past halfway through my 38th year, conveniently marked by my brother Damian’s birthday, and the start of my spring term. Here’s an update on how my intentions for the year are coming along.

1. Add new knowledge to the field of social psychology: I have just finished (I hope) crunching numbers for my honors thesis, and I can say that I have helped produce some new evidence, at least. It is not as sexy as I had hoped, but I have learned a whole lot about the process of psychology research, and that is the main point, as my advisor keeps reminding me.

2. Break my habit of scratching and picking my skin, including biting my lip: I have made some progress here, using a technique Reanna told me about: snapping myself with a hair band around my wrist whenever I had the urge to touch myself. My success varies clearly with my stress level. It requires mindfulness. Another insight/confusion: picking and lip biting, I can tell, are pure stress responses, but the scratching I think is more than that. I seem to be an itchier than normal person. A dermatologist told me that it was the “notoriously harsh” hand-made soap I have been using. I accepted that explanation until I realized on my ride home that he had been wrong. I only use soap on a few key areas. By his reasoning my armpits should be itchier than most of me, and they are not. Any ideas?

3. Celibacy: This has been no problem. I have not been tested, however; no one that I am aware of has wanted to have sex with me. When I first told Grace about this one, she said, “You are going to learn a lot from doing that, but you know, now that you are committed, you will immediately meet someone who will make it very challenging.” Well, not yet.

4. Dance every day, working on 1) musicality 2) vocabulary 3) style: This is going pretty well, though some days my dancing is just a token, so I could say I did. I had a big breakthrough in musicality on my fast dancing at Seattle Balboa Festival in February. The choreography I have been working on with Karly has been helping my working vocabulary. And the main reason I decided to take ballet is to improve my poise and lines. It is easy for me to get into an I-could-be-doing-so-much-more/better state. There is a guy who started in the same beginning class that I did in Eugene who really dove in and is now a rock-star dancer in Portland, winning national competitions. But I still give myself a thumbs up on this one.

5. Finish bachelor’s degree: Yes. I am on track to graduate with honors on June 13, 2009.

6. Get accepted into a couples and family therapy graduate program: Yes. I start in the University of Oregon’s CFT masters program on September 29 (happy birthday to me!), 2009. I’m very excited.

7. Maintain this blog: I have a lot more ideas for posts than actual posts, but I am pretty happy with NME so far. It has been a consistent source of inspiration for me. I get about 20 clicks a day, on average, which seems pretty respectable. The lowest I go is three (two of which are my ever-hopeful-for-a-post Mom, I just discovered), and my peak was 62 on March 31, the day after I posted the guide to my sidebar. I wonder who you all are.

8. Meditate every day: Yes. Sometimes just a few minutes, but yes.

9. Produce a record with David Waingarten: This is not going to happen this year, which I’m sad about. I love this guy’s voice and songwriting. He also makes movies, though, and that’s what he did with his time and money this year. The movie looks good, though. Here’s a preview: This Is Now

10. Record an EP with my band, Abandon Ship: This project is not on schedule, partly because of #12, below, and partly because of how much work an honors thesis is, on top of an internship and classes. I am working on it , but it will almost certainly not be done by my birthday.

11. See healthcare provider each month until all my body concerns are resolved: Yes, I have been doing this. I’ve seen a dermatologist, an orthopedist, a urologist, and two chiropractors. I’m disappointed with the results, so far. I seem to be collecting concerns faster than I am resolving them. Hmm… That makes it seem like I am on my last legs. I am quite healthy, overall, actually.

12. Set up a slick system of musical collaboration over the internet and use it regularly: This has come together much slower than I anticipated, but I have every reason to believe I will be up and running by early May. I can hardly wait.

13. Shift my schedule three hours earlier for at least one term: In bed by 11 pm: I’m very happy with this one, so far. I have not pulled it off perfectly for a term straight—my dance schedule conflicts somewhat with it—but I’d say 90% of the time I’m in bed by 11:30, at least, and that means I’m waking up naturally before my alarm 90% of the time. I love it!

14. Sing out every day: I have not been doing this as I had hoped. I am still inspired to sing out like my friend Zen Zenith, but I have not been working on it with any regularity.

15. Take African dance classes: Yes, I have taken two classes from master dancer Alseny Yansane, and they were awesome. Unfortunately, I have been having this low back pain that has kept me from dancing with that extreme athleticism. When my back stops hurting, I will go back.

16. Write at least one song per month: Nope. I have not written even one complete song. Ouch.

17. Make at least one of each item in Maya’s cookbook: Yummm. I have made four of 19 recipes: Fluffy Whole Wheat Pancakes, Super Hero Granola, Corn Chowder, and Maya’s Tomato soup. They were all excellent except I burned the granola.

 

January 24, 2009

Ethan Mitchell’s Survey about Consent

Posted by Nathen under Ethan Mitchell, science
[2] Comments 

I just completed a survey that my friend, Ethan, is conducting about the nature of consent. He is a radically smart and interesting guy, and a fellow Not Back to School Camp staffer. I never miss one of his workshops, or a chance for a conversation with him, if I can help it. His survey did not disappoint. He encouraged me to pass this on to anyone who I thought would be interested:

Greetings!
You are invited to participate in an online survey about the nature of consent. The survey was created by Ethan Mitchell, an independent scholar working in Vermont. Though consent is a central concept in politics, philosophy, and law, we have surprisingly little research about how people actually envision consent. This survey is an attempt to begin answering that question.

The survey is somewhat more complicated than a traditional multiple-choice poll. It takes about 5-10 minutes to learn the survey interface. Thereafter, the survey is designed so that you can continue taking it for a long time, or stop whenever you please. Most people find that completing the survey takes a good deal of focus and reflection. This is probably not something you want to casually breeze through on your coffee break.

Finally, you are encouraged to forward this invitation to anyone you think might be interested in taking the survey. Thanks very much for your time. I appreciate all the work everyone has put into this, and I hope you find the exercise thought-provoking.
Sincerely, Ethan Mitchell
The survey itself: www.zemita.net/ConsentSurvey.php
Comments: ConsentSurvey@gmail.com
(Ethan will make an effort to respond to all questions sent to this email, either directly or on the website.)

 

January 10, 2009

Another Question I Would Like Answered

Posted by Nathen under drugs, food, questions, science
1 Comment 

Is there anything like an established unit of anti-inflammatory power? How is the effect of anti-inflammatory substances measured? By looking at samples of more or less inflamed tissue after a dosage, or by asking, “So, on a scale of one to seven, how much does your head hurt now?” How much anti-inflammatory power, for example, does a teaspoon of ground ginger in my morning oatmeal have compared to 500 mg of aspirin? How about 900 mg of omega-3 fatty acids from a mix of anchovy, mackerel, and sardine oil?

If you know, please leave me a comment with the information or a link to where I can find out with a minimal amount of reading. I don’t doubt the existence of inflammation, or anti-inflammatory substances, or the importance of both. Most or all of what I’ve read and heard on the topic, though, has been marketing or parroting of marketing, so I wonder what we actually know.

Oh, and I have the same questions for anti-oxidents.

 

October 25, 2008

My Honors Project, or How I Am Spending My Year, Part 1

Posted by Nathen under honors project, psychology, school, science, social cognition lab
1 Comment 

I am in good spirits today. I presented my honors project to my lab I and got an enthusiastic response. This lab is full of really smart and critical people. I’ve seen them demolish articles that I’d thought were good and send big projects practically back to the drawing board. That’s probably not fair to them… I mean, I don’t think they would quite agree with what I just wrote, and to be honest, I can’t quite keep up with their thinking most of the time. They talk quickly and with such certainty and use a lot of lingo that after a year of hard study I’m just getting on to. Anyway, I was nervous to make that presentation and happy to find that in this area of social psychology I’m able to keep up with the thinking of these scientists. I had even anticipated most of their concerns and was able to respond well. From that place, I was able to appreciate their suggestions instead of get defensive. It’s quite an honor, really, to have that many (there are about ten people in the lab) brilliant people helping me think. Wow.

I also ran my first four participants today and it went really smoothly. All of the work I put in on the front end (lots) is paying off. As I ran them, I was able to relax and allow the process to unfold. And as I was doing that I got a lot of good thinking done. One of those thoughts was, “I haven’t posted on my blog for a while, partly because I’ve been spending so much time on this project. Maybe it’s time to write about what I’m doing here.” I’ve been putting in 60-hour weeks on school work, and about a quarter of that has been on my honors project. So, here it is:

I took a class last spring called Experimental Methods in which I was to design an implement an experiment. In my research for that project, I first came across an article by a rock star in the social psychology world,Adam Galinsky, called “Power and Perspectives Not Taken.” In a series of really creative experiments, he showed that having power over other people hurts your ability to take other people’s perspectives. That grabbed my attention because my main philosopher these days, Ken Wilber, is really into developing perspective taking, saying that it’s a super key cognitive ability. The journal articles I’ve been reading agree, too, showing that perspective taking is a major component of empathy and reduces stereotyping, for example. Then I came across an article, called “Power, Approach and Inhibition,” proposing a theory of power based on all the recent research. It painted power in a pretty bad light: Other than making you feel good, power is not a good thing to have, in terms of psychological outcomes. The more power you have, the more likely you are to stereotype, take credit for other people’s work, see others as a means to your own ends, and a bunch of other no-nos. It’s disturbing because these effects of power will tend to cause power to accumulate and keep the powerful ignorant of their faults.

This was a little disturbing personally, too, because in my community, “living powerfully” is a big deal. Don’t live a small, timid life! Live a big, impactful life! On the other hand, empathy is a big deal, too. And what good postmodernist likes stereotyping? But I also noticed that all the papers on power I was reading defined power as “having control of others’ outcomes.” In other words, the kind of power they were talking about is hierarchical power, and that’s not really the kind of power my community is into. In fact, for some of us, it’s against our religion.

Then I came across another, more obscure, article by some Dutch scientists named Van Dijke and Poppe, called “Striving for Personal Power as a Basis for Social Power Dynamics.” They had found that what people who strive for power want is not power over others, but freedom from the power of others. They call that freedom “personal power” to distinguish it from the hierarchical “social power” that has been getting all the attention in the research. When given a choice, people will act to increase their personal power instead of their social power. In fact, if they can get personal power, they will often give up social power. This is big news for any non-anarchist.

So then I did an extensive literature search for research on the psychological outcomes of having personal power, also called agency, autonomy, and a few other things. I found almost nothing, and absolutely nothing on how personal power might affect perspective taking. I was suspicious of that so I emailed MariusVan Dijke about it and he agreed: “I think the distinction is actually a new one, and I am not aware of any other research.” This is a dream for a scientist—a wide open field, and potentially an important one, too.

That’s what I’m doing this year. I’ve designed an experiment to replicate Galinsky’s (which showed that power hinders perspective taking) and adding a personal power dimension to it. If I can reproduce his results then I will be able to add some knowledge to the field. How does having personal power affect perspective taking? I have no idea. I have a hypothesis, of course, because that’s how you do science, but it’ll be exciting not matter how it turns out. If personal power is detrimental to perspective taking, like social power is, that’s pretty big news: Autonomy, bad for perspective taking! If personal power is not detrimental to perspective taking, that’s really big news: In all these struggles for power, the thing that people really want is benign! OK, I know, those are oversimplifications, but there is truth to them. And if it’s somewhere in between, if the perspective taking abilities of people with personal power fall somewhere between the tyrant’s and the slave’s, well, that’s something too. I think that’s most likely, and that’s my hypothesis: Having personal power will bring its own cost and benefit package, and for perspective taking it will be not great but not too bad.

So this term I’m running participants in my experiment, while I learn how to crunch numbers. Winter term I’ll crunch the numbers. Spring term I’ll write it all up. The best case scenario is that my results will be good enough that someone in my lab will do some follow-up experiments and publish it all in a research journal. That would be great. I’d love to be part of the conversation going on out there about human nature. I don’t think, though, that I am going to devote my life to perspective taking research, or power research, or even social psychology. Or even scientific research, though I’m closer to that than I’ve ever been. I think I’d be a good researcher—I’m thorough and smart and I love putting information into contexts and being on the cutting edge of a conversation—but so far I have no indication that I’d be brilliant. I know it’s not fair to compare myself to the others in my lab who’ve been working and studying in this field for years, but that’s what I do, and when I do think about it, so far, it seems that my best strengths lie in a more interpersonal direction. And, so far, that’s where I’m headed. But that’s another story. For now I’m happy being a scientist.

 

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