it's been an uneventful week. wayne persuaded me to head up to the 'burbs with him on memorial day, which i thoroughly regretted. you wouldn't think it, but venture outside of philly and chances are good that you'll land in hicksville. despite spending so many years in this country, i still feel all the old allergies come on when i'm in the hinterlands, that feeling that someone's going to jump out of the bushes and frisk you for harry potter books. why can't we all just get along?

to be fair, it was pretty -- how long had it been since i'd seen open spaces? i just can't do it too often or i'll get republican cooties.

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and while i'm thinking of memorial day: there's something genuinely stirring about the concept of a "tomb of the unknown soldier". and not just the surface meaning of it, but something deeper, something to do with our ability to elevate ourselves into significance after death, when we can almost never accomplish that in life. anyway.

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in the mail: you are cordially invited to attend an Interactive Dinner Symposium: Restless Legs Syndrome. um...no thanks?

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clinicals start next week, which means that in a few months i can start diagnosing people. the line forms to the right.

while the criticisms are true -- that a large percentage of psychology experiments are conducted on the most-unrepresentative population of college undergraduates -- there's also a lot to be said for having subjects who follow your instructions, and show up.

(Read minz's post first, on how "students learn nothing about the methodology and principles of whichever discipline they have chosen, nor the history of the development of said discipline as discipline.")

Further thoughts. Principles are not taught in grade school for 3 reasons.

1) The argument you always hear from the teachers:
Content must precede context. However, by the time my kids have enough content for me to start dealing with context, they are 18 and have graduated.

2) Teachers don't know how.
--> and most (I believe) just think it's a bloody waste of time.

3) All roads lead to "What is the meaning of life?"

e.g.

Q: Why do we study psychology?
A: To understand the mechanisms and causative relationships associated with cognition and behavior, and subsequently be able to make predictions about these phenomena.

Q: Why do we want to make predictions about these phenomena?
A: So that people can use this information to better the quality of human life, in material, or non-material ways.

Q: Why do we want to better the quality of human life?
A: [insert your personal MEANING OF LIFE answer here]

and similarly for all other disciplines. And it's hard to go down that road, and people just don't want to. Better to pretend it doesn't exist at all.

what happens next

so now that my burned offerings have been accepted, i get to stay in the program at least 2 more years unharassed, and also get to start seeing patients. norah had me tag along on thursday to do intelligence testing, something which sounds terribly glamorous when you first start out in the field, but is actually just a pain in the ass. (incid: this actually works out great for "psychologists" in singapore, because they get to shunt all the neuropsych testing onto the wet-behind-the ears fresh grads, with nary a complaint heard.)

i don't know if you've ever considered this, but giving someone an oral intelligence test is highly embarrassing for everyone concerned. (i certainly hadn't thought about it before i did some testing myself in my old job). with pencil-and-paper tests, there's a degree of separation: the candidate never has to see you while you're doing the grading. but with the WAIS, you're right there hammering the poor examinee with mental math and those horrible spatial rotation puzzles i could never do. so there's the guy being roasted, and you're not allowed to offer any correction or feedback, just "mm-hm", and "ok" and other non-commital grunting noises. and they're like: am i a jackass? am i mentally retarded?. and you're like: i dunno? next?

and furthermore, most of the tests i'd administered before were on people with alzheimer's or traumatic brain injuries, so it's not so bad if they're a disaster because you expect that. when we run studies in the lab, we of course have normal people, who grin at you sheepishly as they tell you things like the sun rises in the north, doesn't it? and all i can do is look down at my instruction pad, and continue reading in a monotone. it's like watching two dancers perform, one who's a paralytic, and the other who doesn't know the moves.

i've not reported this here before, but thomas has a little storyreading club going on at his place on thursday nights (this was where i encountered the holy tango, and etiquette). it's a nice small group -- usually 8 or so of us -- a few linguists, a few psychologists, a philospher, and one very quiet girl who knits and reminds me of minz (an english major, i'm sure, but i haven't gotten round to asking). we've had to stop for the summer because people are going to bulgaria and belgium and such, but when we resume in the fall i think it deserves more of a place on this blog. i don't often get to hang out with people who read real books here, and certainly not with the frequency that i used to hang out with the human-s* crowd (who, incidentally, managed to kill our book club before it even started). my love for the group was cemented last week when someone brought anne fadiman's ex libris: confessions of a common reader and read "insert carrot here", but even before that we'd had thurber and asimov and all manner of delightful authors.

* i refuse to type out "humanities", but i really must be befuddling people like lz and a. sorry, guys.

From Crash Course, in The New Yorker, May 14, 2007

In 1969, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which the physicist Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhattan Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, wanted to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?

WILSON: No sir, I don't believe so.
PASTORE: Nothing at all?
WILSON: Nothing at all.
PASTORE: It has no value in that respect?
WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture...It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about...It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker

Whene'er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away
My thoughts, as I sit there and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey:
It teaches me that very like
Am I myself unto my pipe.

Like me this pipe, so fragrant burning,
Is made of naught but earthen clay;
To earth I too shall be returning,
And cannot halt my slow decay.
My well used pipe, now cracked and broken,
Of mortal life is but a token.

No stain, the pipe's hue yet doth darken;
It remains white. Thus do I know
That when to death's call I must harken
My body, too, all pale will grow.
To black beneath the sod 'twill turn,
Likewise the pipe, if oft it burn.

Or when the pipe is fairly glowing,
Behold then instantaneously,
The smoke off into thin air going,
'Til naught but ash is left to see.
Man's fame likewise away will burn
And unto dust his body turn.

How oft it happens when one's smoking,
The tamper's missing from it's shelf,
And one goes with one's finger poking
Into the bowl and burns oneself.
If in the pipe such pain doth dwell
How hot must be the pains of Hell!

Thus o'er my pipe in contemplation
Of such things - I can constantly
Indulge in fruitful meditation,
And so, puffing contentedly,
On land, at sea, at home, abroad,
I smoke my pipe and worship God.

Johann Sebastian Bach

defense (short version)

it was incredibly stressful, but i got through it with a simple, preordained strategy: realize throughout that no one in the room actually cares.

defense (longer version)

the worst part, i think, is when they make you wait outside in the hallway at the beginning and the end while they discuss in hushed voices whether or not you're worthy to pass through the narrow gate, and burn their ballots to see what color smoke arises or whatever it is they do. you're out there, there's nothing to fidget with, you can't read because your heart is racing at 160 beats per minute, and they go on talking and talking for one billion years as solomon laboratory and the entire upenn campus and the mountains themselves crumble to dust around you.

defense (the god honest truth)

Dramatis Personae:

The Student, or Me, or the One Drowning in a Sea of Bewilderment
The Advisor, or the One who Lobs the Occasional Softball, but Otherwise is Just There For the Show
Committee Member #1, or the Insider, or the One Personally Supervising the Drowning of Me in the Sea of Bewilderment
Committee Member #2, or the Outsider, or the One Who Has No Idea What the Hell is Going On, and Has Probably Not Even Read the Damn Paper

---

The Student sits, waiting. Enter the Committee, in flowing white robes.

The Student: Prithee welcome. We are gathered here today so that thou noble selves may deem the worthiness of a poor graduate student to proceed, in future years, to waste more of thy money on matters of Scientific Inconsequence. But first, if thou wilt, please partake of this Caffeinated Beverage and these Petit Fours which I purchased yesterday from my meager stipend at considerable price.

The Committee eats.

The Student: Art thou pleased with this humble repast?

Committee Member #1: It is tolerable.

Committee Member #2: We accept your offering, modest as it is.

The Student: Thou are most gentle and kind.

Committee Member #2: It is in our very nature to be so.

The Student (aside): Though thou liest, I must yet hold my tongue.

The Advisor: So pray, enlighten us on your Scientific Progress this twelvemonth past.

The Student: I would be delighted to, my liege. See here, how I come well-prepared with visual aids and Powerpoint slides that strike to the very heart of the matter. Did I not slave for hours and hours to ensure that their composition was pleasing to the eye? Do they not succinctly capture the essence of my manifold labors?

Committee Member #1: In five minutes, if you will.

The Student (aside): Would I were dead, if God's will were it so. For what is in this world but grief and woe?

The Advisor: But come, tarry not, let us hear of your merry adventures.

The Student: Twas August last we summoned from a pool of subjects that we had recruited...

Commitee Member #1: Nay! I accept not your premise.

The Student: But I had not yet started...

Committee Member #1: You assume too much. What is a subject? What is a subject pool? How do I know we divine the same meaning from this symbolic language which you are using? How are you certain that the concepts you are presenting are represented similarly in my mind's eye as yours? You cannot do this; we do not share a consciousness. Why, what if here and now I denied your very existence, and the existence of reality itself?!

Here, lightning shards pierce the room in a crackling chirascuro

The Student: I submit to thee that reality exists.

Committee Member #1: This is an unsubstantiated claim!

The Advisor: Come S____, let us not quibble over trifles. Here, have one of these Mini-Cheesecakes.

Committee Member #1: (chewing) Indeed, they are creamy, yet their creator had a light touch.

Committee Member #2: Then onward! I have much to do. Tenure does not grow on trees.

The Student: So from these graphs so intricately plotted, we see a lucid pattern doth arise. Confusion falls! The clarity of theory and empirical data once more shine their light on lands we hitherto dared not traverse.

Committee Member #1: So you are well-versed, I understand, in the substance of these matters.

The Student: My knowledge is but a pea in the vast stewpot of thine unimaginable wisdom, but I will answer any queries best I can.

Committee Member #1: What is the capital of the Faroe Islands? Name the next prime number after 1 trillion. What were the significant turning points in the Battle of Puebla, and what were its historical consequences? Describe how the socialist leanings of the Manic Street Preachers influenced and shaped the thoughts of the working class in the United Kingdom in the late 20th century. Account for the weakness of the gravitational force in our 3-dimensional universe.

The Student (groveling): O! Stop! I'm fat and scant of breath!

The Advisor: Our purpose is to build you, make you wiser.

Committee Member #1: What does not kill you only makes you stronger.

The Advisor: Now then. Tell me what you know about sleep.

The Student: When people sleep not they grow mighty weary.

The Advisor: He speaks the truth.

The Student: And by a sleep to say we end the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that human flesh is heir to is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Committee Member #2 (aside): Alack! He has discovered my purpose. I must forestall him with a question:

Committee Member #2: If I may, a word.

The Student: I listen.

Committee Member #2: Could you mayhap explain to a poor Outsider the clinical significance of your research?

somewhere in all of this is beauty

james clavell's king rat, if you haven't read it, is a story set in a malayan prison camp during the japanese occupation of wwii. much is made in the book of food and cigarettes, in particular how much eggs were prized among the inmates:

The King was pleased. "You wait till I finish. Then you'll see the goddamnest egg you've ever seen." He powdered the eggs with pepper, then added the salt.

-- which leads to Marlowe being

...pacified by the glory of the sizzling eggs.

this goes on for some pages. later on, the men trade in eggs, argue about them, accuse each other of stealing them, and so forth. ok.

in victor frankl's books about his experiences in the concentration camp, he often says things like this:

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling. But we were thankful if there was no air raid alarm during this operation and the lights were not switched off. If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night.

similar quotes have to do with the joy of having extra potatoes, or looking up from time to time into a clear sky.

so you could go on looking for examples all day, but my point is that the extraction of exquisite pleasure from the utterly mundane is something that's been written about a lot, and something that i'm sure most people experience at some point in their lives (particularly if you went through ns, but i'll spare you those recollections).

now take that feeling a little bit further, and remove as a necessary quality its positive valence. remove also the necessity for it to have any specific proximal cause. now what you're left with is something like c.s. lewis' Joy, a feeling desired, but not necessarily pleasurable, an underwelling, a spiritual sensation, a notion that beneath the surface characteristics of the mundane is something infinitely powerful.

so, it may just be that i've been smoking crack, but the more i read and talk to people, the more i sense that this is a very common human experience, though one that is incredibly hard to put into words. maybe it's a zen thing, that it defies description because the notion gets more slippery as you try harder to verbalize what it is. in any case, it's (to me) one of the big psychological mysteries. what is that feeling? is it religious? is that what people mean when they say they're experiencing 'God' (the honest ones, not the fruitcakes). is it something that emerges because of our cognitive biases to categorize things and draw connections? and, in the frame of your choice, is it important, or just a feeling like any other?

the fall-to-spring academic year has a tempo completely different from the january-to-december academic year we grew up with. both are pragmatic, but the american system has stronger parallels to a narrative, a sense of beginning, middle and end. and, as eliot once said, the end is the beginning, the sending-forth; but the beginning for many people is also a kind of end: of imagining life will always be the same, of the wish that home is forever, and that the people you love will never change.

i was going to stay at home and lounge around reading today, but by 10 being alone in my apartment was making me think of drug suicides and motorcycle emptiness, so i went to my lab to surf amazon.com and fiddle with my conference abstracts. summer is here, and the undergrads are gone. we had a farewell lunch for them yesterday on the penthouse level of brb: baked ziti and stromboli and a large ebony-and-ivory cake ("CONGRATULATIONS, SENIORS!"). people come and go so often in modern life. we must come into contact with tremendous numbers of people compared to humans just a few generations before us, and they appear and disappear with frightening suddenness. i wonder if that doesn't put a lot of stress on us psychologically. if you count up all the fake 'how are yous', over the days and weeks, that has to take a toll.

From The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski:

A common procedure, when there is room of course, is to put one's finger on the top of a book and pull gently against the headband to rotate the book in its place until its top corner projects out enough from the other books on the shelf for it to be grapsped and removed. Martha Stewart Living does not approve: "Never hook your finger over the top of the spine." The problem with doing so is that it can lead to broken fingernails or, perhaps worse, to torn book bindings. As a nineteenth-century "handy-book" warned, "Never pull a book from the shelf by the head-band; do not toast them over the fire, or sit on them, for 'Books are kind friends, we benefit by their advice, and they reveal no confidences.'""

i was looking through what i'd written over the past few months and figured it was time for a short break from wordy expositions. so, just for a change, here are some pictures of flowers:

first things first:



right. binding costs $2.95 a pop at campus copy -- not morbidly expensive, but enough to give pause. bribery and impression management: the hidden underworld of graduate school. i'm not even kidding: the next thing i have to worry about is what kind of coffee the people on my committee particularly fancy, and whether or not pistachios are appropriate. maybe some boston creams? i hear that too fussy is no good, but then aren't all distractions from the actual product beneficial to the cause? how can they see with sequins in their eyes?

but yes: it's over, for now.

i found myself with about an hour to kill before my presentation today (!), so i went into the bookstore and read the first few chapters of douglas hofstadter's i am a strange loop, which was entertaining but completely antithetical to what i believe in a number of ways. his stand, which seems to resemble that of many philosophers of neuroscience nowadays, is that the vertical integration of neuronal, systems and cognitive theories is neither possible nor desirable. i say: nonsense. inconceivable at the present moment, maybe, but so were bullet trains a hundred years ago. the gestalt of consciousness from matter, the explanation of how that occurs lurks in the interstices, the sticky places that neuroscientists and psychologists alike are wary of exploring. and i shall control myself here by not talking too much about fools rushing in, but you know what i mean*.

and then came the presentation, which was shit, and has convinced me that i need to make a bullet-pointed script before i go into my defense on the 15th. the difficulty is that all of our committees have one "outsider", someone with no background in the subject material, and so we have to pitch the talk at an appropriate level while still hitting all the high points. this was impossible to do on the fly, as i discovered, and i'm glad i had the opportunity to look like an idiot among other grad students before i did so in front of my advisor.

* and to be fair, his point is that we can all live and read good books and smell the coffee without understanding the (sub)atomic world, which is true, and cheerfully anti-reductionist, but also immensely unsatisfying.

rant

if i get the question "what practical significance does your research have?" just one more time there's going to be a chainsaw massacre in the department. do people not know that asking that is taboo? the brother and i had this conversation, like, 2 years ago, and he was an undergrad at the time -- you would have thought that grad students would have figured this out by this stage in their lives. you just don't get to ask that. my work has no external or clinical worth, and that's just how it is, and i'm certainly not going to "frame it in a larger context" in my paper. or, if you really must have a story, 150 years down the road bioengineering and neuroscience are finally going to be wed, and all this information about neuroanatomy and physiology will be used to build fully functioning artificial brains capable of interfacing with machines, and then we'll have cylons who nuke the planet and send the vestiges of humanity into outer space, and that's the practical significance of my work. there.

"clinical research", i think, was created to ease the guilty consciences of people who have realized, and are petrified of the fact that science is a societally acceptable brand of onanism. you play in your own little sandbox, and spend taxpayer's money, and feel smart because no one else knows what the hell it is you're doing, and it's ok. and then there are a few ways things can go -- you can justify it to yourself by using the tongue-in-cheek cylon argument above, who can say where the road goes? all we can do is what we can do. or the monkeys on typewriters argument -- with enough scattershot science we're bound to find the Universal Theory of Everything sooner or later. and finally: my research has "clinical relevance", which is intuitively admirable, but rests on about a billion assumptions about the whole enterprise, the least of which is hume's is-ought problem. it's a guilt complex, i'm telling you, like people who bring their paychecks home every month and then scream about how the money is tainted because they had to work for The Man.

besides, if human advancement is both an offshoot and a stimulator of research, and modern pathology/discontent/whatever is at least partially a symptom of human advancement, you now have a self-referential loop, where the clinical researchers are both fixing, and contributing to the self-same problem. Which means that the net advancement afforded by these people is at most slightly above 0 (and possibly negative). so now you have people spending money to do little more than assuage their own guilt. moral of the story: all these stupid studies of whether caffeine is good or bad for you, comparing CBT and IPT ... i'm not even saying don't do them, but at least own up to the fact that research, like almost everything else you can choose as a career in life, is done mostly for selfish reasons. and the reason that we get paid less than what we're "worth"* is not that we're martyrs burning ourselves at the stake for the cause of future generations, but because it's rewarding -- and if you believe that economics has got it right, more personally rewarding than a corporate career. but there's the rub -- it is rewarding. so there you have it. my work is pure, and hopefully one day it will be beautiful too. and i'll feel good about it, no justifications or practicality necessary.

* yes, whole new can of worms, but let's hold to present, and not utopian ideals of worth for now