[citation needed]

Friday, April 1

4 pm. Arrive at SFO International on bumpy flight from Denver.

4:45 pm. Approach well-dressed man downtown and open mouth to ask for directions to Hyatt Regency San Francisco. “Sorry,” says well-dressed man, “No change to give.” Back off slowly, swinging bags, beard, and poster tube wildly, mumbling “I’m not a panhandler, I’m a neuroscientist.” Realize that difference between the two may be smaller than initially suspected.

6:30 pm. Hear loud knocking on hotel room door. Open door to find roommate. Say hello to roommate. Realize roommate is extremely drunk from East Coast flight. Offer roommate bag of coffee and orange tic-tacs. Roommate is confused, asks, “are you drunk?” Ignore roommate’s question. “You’re drunk, aren’t you.” Deny roommate’s unsubstantiated accusations. “When you write about this on your blog, you better not try to make it look like I’m the drunk one,” roommate says. Resolve to ignore roommate’s crazy talk for next 4 days.

6:45 pm. Attempt to open window of 10th floor hotel room in order to procure fresh air for face. Window refuses to open. Commence nudging of, screaming at, and bargaining with window. Window still refuses to open. Roommate points out sticker saying window does not open. Ignore sticker, continue berating window. Window still refuses to open, but now has low self-esteem.

8 pm. Have romantic candlelight dinner at expensive french restaurant with roommate. Make jokes all evening about ideal location (San Francisco) for start of new intimate relationship. Suspect roommate is uncomfortable, but persist in faux wooing. Roommate finally turns tables by offering to put out. Experience heightened level of discomfort, but still finish all of steak tartare and order creme brulee. Dessert appetite is immune to off-color humor!

11 pm – 1 am. Grand tour of seedy SF bars with roommate and old grad school friend. New nightlife low: denied entrance to seedy dance club because shoes insufficiently classy. Stupid Teva sandals.

Saturday, April 2

9:30 am. Wake up late. Contemplate running downstairs to check out ongoing special symposium for famous person who does important research. Decide against. Contemplate visiting hotel gym to work off creme brulee from last night. Decide against. Contemplate reading conference program in bed and circling interesting posters to attend. Decide against. Contemplate going back to sleep. Consult with self, make unanimous decision in favor.

1 pm. Have extended lunch meeting with collaborators at Ferry Building to discuss incipient top-secret research project involving diesel generator, overstock beanie babies, and apple core. Already giving away too much!

3:30 pm. Return to hotel. Discover hotel is now swarming with name badges attached to vaguely familiar faces. Hug vaguely familiar faces. Hugs are met with startled cries. Realize that vaguely familiar faces are actually completely unfamiliar faces. Wrong conference: Young Republicans, not Cognitive Neuroscientists. Make beeline for elevator bank, pursued by angry middle-aged men dressed in American flags.

5 pm. Poster session A! The sights! The sounds! The lone free drink at the reception! The wonders of yellow 8-point text on black 6′ x 4′ background! Too hard to pick a favorite thing, not even going to try. Okay, fine: free schwag at the exhibitor stands.

5 pm – 7 pm. Chat with old friends. Have good time catching up. Only non-fictionalized bullet point of entire piece.

8 pm. Dinner at belly dancing restaurant in lower Haight. Great conversation, good food, mediocre dancing. Towards end of night, insist on demonstrating own prowess in fine art of torso shaking; climb on table and gyrate body wildly, alternately singing Oompa-Loompa song and yelling “get in my belly!” at other restaurant patrons. Nobody tips.

12:30 am. Take the last train to Clarksville. Take last N train back to Hyatt Regency hotel.

Sunday, April 3

7 am. Wake up with amazing lack of hangover. Celebrate amazing lack of hangover by running repeated victory laps around 10th floor of Hyatt Regency, Rocky Steps style. Quickly realize initial estimate of hangover absence off by order of magnitude. Revise estimate; collapse in puddle on hotel room floor. Refuse to move until first morning session.

8:15 am. Wander the eight Caltech aisles of morning poster session in search of breakfast. Fascinating stuff, but this early in morning, only value signals of interest are smell and sight of coffee, muffins, and bagels.

10 am. Terrific symposium includes excellent talks about emotion, brain-body communication, and motivation, but favorite moment is still when friend arrives carrying bucket of aspirin.

1 pm. Bump into old grad school friend outside; decide to grab lunch on pier behind Ferry Building. Discuss anterograde amnesia and dating habits of mutual friends. Chicken and tofu cake is delicious. Sun is out, temperature is mild; perfect day to not attend poster sessions.

1:15 – 2 pm. Attend poster session.

2 pm – 5 pm. Presenting poster in 3 hours! Have full-blown panic attack in hotel room. Not about poster, about General Hospital. Why won’t Lulu take Dante’s advice and call support group number for alcoholics’ families?!?! Alcohol is Luke’s problem, Lulu! Call that number!

5 pm. Present world’s most amazing poster to three people. Launch into well-rehearsed speech about importance of work and great glory of sophisticated technical methodology before realizing two out of three people are mistakenly there for coffee and cake, and third person mistook presenter for someone famous. Pause to allow audience to mumble excuses and run to coffee bar. When coast is clear, resume glaring at anyone who dares to traverse poster aisle. Believe strongly in marking one’s territory.

8 pm. Lab dinner at House of Nanking. Food is excellent, despite unreasonably low tablespace-to-floorspace ratio. Conversation revolves around fainting goats, ‘relaxation’ in Thailand, and, occasionally, science.

10 pm. Karaoke at The Mint. Compare performance of CNS attendees with control group of regulars; establish presence of robust negative correlation between years of education and singing ability. Completely wreck voice performing whitest rendition ever of Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina”. Crowd jeers. No, wait, crowd gyrates. In wholesome scientific manner. Crowd is composed entirely of people with low self-monitoring skills; what luck! DJ grimaces through entire song and most of previous and subsequent songs.

2 am. Take cab back to hotel with graduate students and Memory Professor. Memory Professor is drunk; manages to nearly fall out of cab while cab in motion. In-cab conversation revolves around merits of dynamic programming languages. No consensus reached, but civility maintained. Arrival at hotel: all cab inhabitants below professorial rank immediately slip out of cab and head for elevators, leaving Memory Professor to settle bill. In elevator, Graduate Student A suggests that attempt to push Memory Professor out of moving cab was bad idea in view of Graduate Student A’s impending post-doc with Memory Professor. Acknowledge probable wisdom of Graduate Student A’s observation while simultaneously resolving to not adjust own degenerate behavior in the slightest.

2:15 am. Drink at least 24 ounces of water before attaining horizontal position. Fall asleep humming bars of Elliott Smith’s Angeles. Wrong city, but close enough.

Monday, April 4

8 am. Wake up hangover free again! For real this time. No Rocky Steps dance. Shower and brush teeth. Delicately stroke roommate’s cheek (he’ll never know) before heading downstairs for poster session.

8:30 am. Bagels, muffin, coffee. Not necessarily in that order.

9 am – 12 pm. Skip sessions, spend morning in hotel room working. While trying to write next section of grant proposal, experience strange sensation of time looping back on itself, like a snake eating its own tail, but also eating grant proposal at same time. Awake from unexpected nap with ‘Innovation’ section in mouth.

12:30 pm. Skip lunch; for some reason, not very hungry.

1 pm. Visit poster with screaming purple title saying “COME HERE FOR FREE CHOCOLATE.” Am impressed with poster title and poster, but disappointed by free chocolate selection: Dove eggs and purple Hershey’s kisses–worst chocolate in the world! Resolve to show annoyance by disrupting presenter’s attempts to maintain conversation with audience. Quickly knocked out by chocolate eggs thrown by presenter.

5 pm. Wake up in hotel room with headache and no recollection of day’s events. Virus or hangover? Unclear. For some reason, hair smells like chocolate.

7:30 pm. Dinner at Ferry Building with Brain Camp friends. Have now visited Ferry Building at least one hundred times in seventy-two hours. Am now compulsively visiting Ferry Building every fifteen minutes just to feel normal.

9:30 pm. Party at Americano Restaurant & Bar for Young Investigator Award winner. Award comes with $500 and strict instructions to be spent on drinks for total strangers. Strange tradition, but noone complains.

11 pm. Bar is crowded with neuroscientists having great time at Young Investigator’s expense.

11:15 pm. Drink budget runs out.

11:17 pm. Neuroscientists mysteriously vanish.

1 am. Stroll through San Francisco streets in search of drink. Three false alarms, but finally arrive at open pub 10 minutes before last call. Have extended debate with friend over whether hotel room can be called ‘home’. Am decidedly in No camp; ‘home’ is for long-standing attachments, not 4-day hotel hobo runs.

2 am. Walk home.

Tuesday, April 5

9:05 am. Show up 5 minutes late for bagels and muffins. All gone! Experience Apocalypse Now moment on inside, but manage not to show it–except for lone tear. Drown sorrows in Tazo Wild Sweet Orange tea. Tea completely fails to live up to name; experience second, smaller, Apocalypse Now moment. Roommate walks over and asks if everything okay, then gently strokes cheek and brushes away lone tear (he knew!!!).

9:10 – 1 pm. Intermittently visit poster and symposium halls. Not sure why. Must be force of habit learning system.

1:30 pm. Lunch with friends at Thai restaurant near Golden Gate Park. Fill belly up with coconut, noodles, and crab. About to get on table to express gratitude with belly dance, but notice that friends have suddenly disappeared.

2 – 5 pm. Roam around Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury. Stop at Whole Foods for friend to use bathroom. Get chased out of Whole Foods for using bathroom without permission. Very exciting; first time feeling alive on entire trip! Continue down Haight. Discuss socks, ice cream addiction (no such thing), and funding situation in Europe. Turns out it sucks there too.

5:15 pm. Take BART to airport with lab members. Watch San Francisco recede behind train. Sink into slightly melancholic state, but recognize change of scenery is for the best: constitution couldn’t handle more Rocky Steps mornings.

7:55 pm. Suddenly rediscover pronouns as airplane peels away from gate.

8 pm PST – 11:20 MST. The flight’s almost completely empty; I get to stretch out across the entire emergency exit aisle. The sun goes down as we cross the Sierra Nevada; the last of the ice in my cup melts into water somewhere between Provo and Grand Junction. As we start our descent into Denver, the lights come out in force, and I find myself preemptively bored at the thought of the long shuttle ride home. For a moment, I wish I was back in my room at the Hyatt at 8 am–about to run Rocky Steps around the hotel, or head down to the poster hall to find someone to chat with over a bagel and coffee. For some reason, I still feel like I didn’t get quite enough time to hang out with all the people I wanted to see, despite barely sleeping in 4 days. But then sanity returns, and the thought quickly passes.

Sanjay Srivastava has an excellent post up today discussing the common belief among many academics (or at least psychologists) that graduate school admission interviews aren’t very predictive of actual success, and should be assigned little or no weight when making admissions decisions:

The argument usually goes something like this: “All the evidence from personnel selection studies says that interviews don’t predict anything. We are wasting people’s time and money by interviewing grad students, and we are possibly making our decisions worse by substituting bad information for good.”

I have been hearing more or less that same thing for years, starting when I was grad school myself. In fact, I have heard it often enough that, not being familiar with the literature myself, I accepted what people were saying at face value. But I finally got curious about what the literature actually says, so I looked it up.

I confess that I must have been drinking from the kool-aid spigot, because until I read Sanjay’s post, I’d long believed something very much like this myself, and for much the same reason. I’d never bothered to actually, you know, look at the data myself. Turns out the evidence and the kool-aid are not compatible:

A little Google Scholaring for terms like “employment interviews” and “incremental validity” led me to a bunch of meta-analyses that concluded that in fact interviews can and do provide useful information above and beyond other valid sources of information (like cognitive ability tests, work sample tests, conscientiousness, etc.). One of the most heavily cited is a 1998 Psych Bulletin paper by Schmidt and Hunter (link is a pdf; it’s also discussed in this blog post). Another was this paper by Cortina et al, which makes finer distinctions among different kinds of interviews. The meta-analyses generally seem to agree that (a) interviews correlate with job performance assessments and other criterion measures, (b) interviews aren’t as strong predictors as cognitive ability, (c) but they do provide incremental (non-overlapping) information, and (d) in those meta-analyses that make distinctions between different kinds of interviews, structured interviews are better than unstructured interviews.

This seems entirely reasonable, and I agree with Sanjay that it clearly shows that admissions interviews aren’t useless, at least in an actuarial sense. That said, after thinking about it for a while, I’m not sure these findings really address the central question admissions committees care about. When deciding which candidates to admit as students, the relevant question isn’t really what factors predict success in graduate school?, it’s what factors should the admissions committee attend to when making a decision? These may seem like the same thing, but they’re not. And the reason they’re not is that knowing which factors are predictive of success is no guarantee that faculty are actually going to be able to use that information in an appropriate way. Knowing what predicts performance is only half the story, as it were; you also need to know exactly how to weight different factors appropriately in order to generate an optimal prediction.

In practice, humans turn out to be incredibly bad at predicting outcomes based on multiple factors. An enormous literature on mechanical (or actuarial) prediction, which Sanjay mentions in his post, has repeatedly demonstrated that in many domains, human judgments are consistently and often substantially outperformed by simple regression equations. There are several reasons for this gap, but one of the biggest ones is that people are just shitty at quantitatively integrating multiple continuous variables. When you visit a car dealership, you may very well be aware that your long-term satisfaction with any purchase is likely to depend on some combination of horsepower, handling, gas mileage, seating comfort, number of cupholders, and so on. But the odds that you’ll actually be able to combine that information in an optimal way are essentially nil. Our brains are simply not designed to work that way; you can’t internally compute the value you’d get out of a car using an equation like 1.03*cupholders + 0.021*horsepower + 0.3*mileage. Some of us try to do it that way–e.g., by making very long pro and con lists detailing all the relevant factors we can possibly think of–but it tends not to work out very well (e.g., you total up the numbers and realize, hey, that’s not the answer I wanted! And then you go buy that antique ’68 Cadillac you had your eye on the whole time you were pretending to count cupholders in the Nissan Maxima).

Admissions committees face much the same problem. The trouble lies not so much in determining which factors predict graduate school success (or, for that matter, many other outcomes we care about in daily life), but in determining how to best combine them. Knowing that interview performance incrementally improves predictions is only useful if you can actually trust decision-makers to weight that variable very lightly relative to other more meaningful predictors like GREs and GPAs. And that’s a difficult proposition, because I suspect that admissions discussions rarely go like this:

Faculty Member 1: I think we should accept Candidate X. Her GREs are off the chart, great GPA, already has two publications.
Faculty Member 2: I didn’t like X at all. She didn’t seem very excited to be here.
FM1: Well, that doesn’t matter so much. Unless you really got a strong feeling that she wouldn’t stick it out in the program, it probably won’t make much of a difference, performance-wise.
FM2: Okay, fine, we’ll accept her.

And more often go like this:

FM1: Let’s take Candidate X. Her GREs are off the chart, great GPA, already has two publications.
FM2: I didn’t like X at all. She didn’t seem very excited to be here.
FM1: Oh, you thought so too? That’s kind of how I felt too, but I didn’t want to say anything.
FM2: Okay, we won’t accept X. We have plenty of other good candidates with numbers that are nearly as good and who seemed more pleasant.

Admittedly, I don’t have any direct evidence to back up this conjecture. Except that I think it would be pretty remarkable if academic faculty departed from experts in pretty much every other domain that’s been tested (clinical practice, medical diagnosis, criminal recidivism, etc.) and were actually able to do as well (or even close to as well) as a simple regression equation. For what it’s worth, in many of the studies of mechanical prediction, the human experts are explicitly given all of the information passed to the prediction equation, and still do relatively poorly. In other words, you can hand a clinical psychologist a folder full of quantitative information about a patient, tell them to weight it however they want, and even the best clinicians are still going to be outperformed by a mechanical prediction (if you doubt this to be true, I second Sanjay in directing you to Paul Meehl’s seminal body of work–truly some of the most important and elegant work ever done in psychology, and if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out). And in some sense, faculty members aren’t really even experts about admissions, since they only do it once a year. So I’m pretty skeptical that admissions committees actually manage to weight their firsthand personal experience with candidates appropriately when making their final decisions. It seems much more likely that any personality impressions they come away with will just tend to drown out prior assessments based on (relatively) objective data.

That all said, I couldn’t agree more with Sanjay’s ultimate conclusion, so I’ll just end with this quote:

That, of course, is a testable question. So if you are an evidence-based curmudgeon, you should probably want some relevant data. I was not able to find any studies that specifically addressed the importance of rapport and interest-matching as predictors of later performance in a doctoral program. (Indeed, validity studies of graduate admissions are few and far between, and the ones I could find were mostly for medical school and MBA programs, which are very different from research-oriented Ph.D. programs.) It would be worth doing such studies, but not easy.

Oh, except that I do want to add that I really like the phrase “evidence-based curmudgeon“, and I’m totally stealing it.

I’ve recently started recruiting participants for online experiments via Mechanical Turk. In the past I’ve always either relied on on directory listings (like this one) or targeted specific populations (e.g., bloggers and twitterers) via email solicitation. But recently I’ve started running a very large-sample decision-making study (it’s here, if you care to contribute to the sample), and waiting for participants to trickle in via directories isn’t cutting it. So I’ve started paying people (very) small amounts of money for participation.

One challenge I’ve had to deal with is figuring out how to filter out participants who aren’t really interested in contributing to science, and are strictly in it for the money. 20 or 30 cents is a pittance to most people in the developed world, but as I’ve found out the hard way, gaming MTurk appears to be a thriving business in some developing countries (some of which I’ve unfortunately had to resort to banning entirely). Cheaters aren’t so much of an issue for very quick tasks like providing individual ratings of faces, because (a) the time it takes to give a fake rating isn’t substantially greater than giving one’s actual opinion, and (b) the standards for what counts as accurate performance are clear, so it’s easy to train workers and weed out the bad apples. Unfortunately, my studies generally involve fairly long personality questionnaires combined with other cognitive tasks (e.g., in the current study, you get to repeatedly allocate hypothetical money between yourself and a computer partner, and rate some faces). They often take around half an hour, and involve 20+ questions per screen, so there’s a pretty big incentive for workers who are only in it for the cash to produce random responses and try to increase their effective wage. And the obvious question then is how to detect cheating in the data.

One of the techniques I’ve found works surprisingly well is to simply compare each person’s pattern of responses across items with the mean for the entire sample. In other words, you just compute the correlation between each individual’s item scores and the means for all the items scores across everyone who’s filled out the same measure. I know that there’s an entire literature on this stuff full of much more sophisticated ways to detect random responding, but I find this crude approach really does quite well (I’ve verified this by comparing it with a bunch of other similar metrics), and has the benefit of being trivial to implement.

Anyway, one of the things that surprised me when I first computed these correlations is just how strong the relationship between the sample mean and most individuals’ responses is. Here’s what the distribution looks like for one particular inventory, the 181-item Analog to Multiple Broadband Inventories (AMBI, whichI introduced in this paper, and discuss further here):

This is based on a sample of about 600 internet respondents, which actually turns out to be pretty representative of the broader population, as Sam Gosling, Simine Vazire, and Sanjay Srivastava will tell you (for what it’s worth, I’ve done the exact same analysis on a similar-sized off-line dataset from Lew Goldberg’s Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (check out that URL!) and obtained essentially the same results). In this sample, the median correlation is .48; so, in effect, you can predict a quarter of the variance in a typical participant’s responses without knowing anything at all about them. Human beings, it turns out, have some things in common with one another (who knew?). What you think you’re like is probably not very dissimilar to what I think I’m like. Which is kind of surprising, considering you’re a well-adjusted, friendly human being, and I’m a real freakshow somewhat eccentric, paranoid kind of guy.

What drives that similarity? Much of it probably has to do with social desirability–i.e., many of the AMBI items (and those on virtually all personality inventories) are evaluatively positive or negative statements that most people are inclined to strongly agree or disagree with. But it seems to be a particular kind of social desirability–one that has to do with openness to new experiences, and particular intellectual ones. For instance, here are the top 10 most endorsed items (based on mean likert scores across the entire sample; scores are in parentheses):

1. like to read (4.62)
2. like to visit new places (4.39)
3. was a better than average student when I was in school (4.28)
4. am a good listener (4.25)
5. would love to explore strange places (4.22)
6. am concerned about others (4.2)
7. am open to new experiences (4.18)
8. amuse my friends (4.16)
9. love excitement (4.08)
10. spend a lot of time reading (4.07)

And conversely, here are the 10 least-endorsed items:

1. was a slow learner in school (1.52)
2. don’t think that laws apply to me (1.8)
3. do not like to visit museums (1.83)
4. have difficulty imagining things (1.84)
5. have no special urge to do something original (1.87)
6. do not like art (1.95)
7. feel little concern for others (1.97)
8. don’t try to figure myself out (2.01)
9. break my promises (2.01)
10. make enemies (2.06)

You can see a clear evaluative component in both lists: almost everyone believes that they’re concerned about others and thinks that they’re smarter than average. But social desirability and positive illusions aren’t enough to explain these patterns, because there are plenty of other items on the AMBI that have an equally strong evaluative component–for instance, “don’t have much energy”, “cannot imagine lying or cheating”, “see myself as a good leader”, and “am easily annoyed”–yet have mean scores pretty close to the midpoint (in fact, the item ‘am easily annoyed’ is endorsed more highly than 107 of the 181 items!). So it isn’t just that we like to think and say nice things about ourselves; we’re willing to concede that we have some bad traits, but maybe not the ones that have to do with disliking cultural and intellectual experiences. I don’t have much of an idea as to why that might be, but it does introspectively feel to me like there’s more of a stigma about, say, not liking to visit new places or experience new things than admitting that you’re kind of an irritable person. Or maybe it’s just that many of the openness items can be interpreted more broadly than the other evaluative items–e.g., there are lots of different art forms, so almost everyone can endorse a generic “I like art” statement. I don’t really know.

Anyway, there’s nothing the least bit profound about any of this; if anything, it’s just a nice reminder that most of us are not really very good at evaluating where we stand in relation to other people, at least for many traits (for more on that, go read Simine Vazire’s work). The nominal midpoint on most personality scales is usually quite far from the actual median in the general population. This is a pretty big challenge for personality psychology, and if we could figure out how to get people to rank themselves more accurately relative to other people on self-report measures, that would be a pretty huge advance. But it seems quite likely that you just can’t do it, because people simply may not have introspective access to that kind of information.

Fortunately for our ability to measure individual differences in personality, there are plenty of items that do show considerable variance across individuals (actually, in fairness, even items with relatively low variance like the ones above can be highly discriminative if used properly–that’s what item response theory is for). Just for kicks, here are the 10 AMBI items with the largest standard deviations (in parentheses):

1. disliked math in school (1.56)
2. wanted to run away from home when I was a child (1.56)
3. believe in a universal power or god (1.53)
4. have felt contact with a divine power (1.51)
5. rarely cry during sad movies (1.46)
6. am able to fix electrical-wiring problems (1.46)
7. am devoted to religion (1.44)
8. shout or scream when I’m angry (1.43)
9. love large parties (1.42)
10. felt close to my parents when I was a child (1.42)

So now finally we come to the real moral of this post… that which you’ve read all this long way for. And the moral is this, grasshopper: if you want to successfully pick a fight at a large party, all you need to do is angrily yell at everyone that God told you math sucks.

An only slightly fictionalized story, for my long-suffering wife.

“It’s happening again,” I tell my wife from the couch. “I’m having that soul-crushing experience again.”

“Too much work?” she asks, expecting the answer to be yes, since no matter what quantity of work I’m actually burdened with at any given moment, the way I describe it to to other people when they ask is always “too much.”

“No,” I say. “Work is fine right now.”

“Had a paper rejected?”

“Pfft, no,” I say. “Like that ever happens to me!” (I don’t tell her it’s happened to me twice in the past week.)

“Then what?”

“The blog posts,” I tell her, motioning to my laptop screen. “There’s just too many of them in my Reader. I can’t keep up! I’m drowning in RSS feeds!”

My wife has learned not to believe anything I say, ever; we’ve lived together long enough that her modal response to my complaints is an arched eyebrow. So I flip my laptop around and point at the gigantic bolded text in the corner that says All Items (118). Emotionally gigantic, I mean; physically, I think it’s only like 12 point font.

“One hundred and eighteen blog posts!” I yell at absolutely no one. “I’m going to be here all night!”

“That’s because you live here,” she helpfully points out.

I’m not sure exactly when I became enslaved by my blog feeds. I know it was sometime after Carl Zimmer‘s amazing post about the man-eating fireflies of Sri Lanka, and sometime before the Neuroskeptic self-published his momentous report introducing three entirely new mental health diagnoses. But that’s as much as I can tell you; the rest is lost in a haze of rapid-scrolling text, retweeted links, and never-ending comment threads. There’s no alarm bell that sounds out loud to indicate that you’ve stomped all over the line that separates occasional indulgence from outright “I can quit any time, honest!” abuse. No one shows up at your door, hands you a bucket of Skittles, and says, “congratulations! You’re hooked on feeds!”

The thought of all those unread posts piling up causes me to hyperventilate. My wife, who sits unperturbed in her chair as 1,000+ unread articles pile up in her Reader, stares at me with a mixture of bemusement and horror.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggests, making a completely transparent effort to distract me from my immense problems.

Going for a walk is, of course, completely out of the question; I still have 118 blog posts to read before I can do anything else. So I read all 118 posts, which turns out not to take all night, but more like 15 minutes (I have a very loose definition of reading; it’s closer to what other people call ‘seeing’). By the time I’ve done that, the internet has written another 8 new articles, so now I feel compelled to read those too. So I do that, and then I hit refresh again, and lo and behold, there are 2 MORE articles. So I grudgingly read those as well, and then I quickly shut my laptop so that no new blog posts can sneak up on me while I’m off hanging out in Microsoft Word pretending to do work.

Screw this, I think after a few seconds, and run to find my wife.

“Come on, let’s go for that walk,” I say, running as fast as I can towards my sandals.

“What’s the big rush,” she asks. “I want to go walking, not jogging; I already went to the gym today.”

“No choice,” I say. “We have to get back before the posts pile up again.”

“What?”

“I said, I have a lot of work to do.”

So we go out walking, and it’s nice and all that; the temperature is probably around 70 degrees; it’s cool and dry and the sun’s just going down; the ice cream carts are out in force on the Pearl Street mall; the jugglers juggle and the fire eaters eat fire and give themselves cancer; a little kid falls down and skins his knee but gets up and laughs like it didn’t even hurt, which it probably didn’t, because everyone knows children under seven years of age don’t have a central nervous system and can’t feel pain. It’s a really nice walk, and I’m happy we’re on it, but the whole time I keep thinking, How many dozens of posts has PZ Myers put up while I’ve been gone? Are Razib Khan and Ed Yong posting their link dumps as I think this? And what’s the over-under on the number of posts in my ‘cog blogs’ folder?

She sees me doing all this of course, and she’s not happy about it. So she lets me know it.

“I’m not happy about this,” she says.

When we get back, we each back to our respective computer screen. I’m relieved to note that the internet’s only made 11 more deliveries, which I promptly review and discharge. I star two posts for later re-consideration and let the rest disappear into the ether of spent words. Then I open up a manuscript I’ve been working on for a while and pretend to do some real work for a couple of hours. With periodic edutainment breaks, of course.

Around 11:30 pm I decide to close up shop for the night. No one really blogs after about 9 pm, which is fortunate, or I’d never get any sleep. It’s also the reason I avoid subscribing to European blogs if I can help it. Europeans have no respect for Mountain Time.

“Are you coming to bed,” I ask my wife.

“Not yet,” she says, looking guilty and avoiding eye contact.

“Why not? You have work to do?”

“Nope, no work.”

“Cooking? Are you making a fancy meal for dinner tomorrow?”

“No, it’s your turn to cook tomorrow,” she says, knowing full well that my idea of cooking consists of a take-out menu and telephone.

“Then what?”

She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. The words are all jammed tightly in between her vocal cords.

Then I see it, poking out on the couch from under a pillow: green cover, 9 by 6 inches, 300 pages long. It’s that damn book!

“You’re reading Pride and Prejudice again,” I say. It’s an observation, not a question.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. You’re reading that damn book again. I know it. I can see it. It’s right there.” I point at it, just so that there can’t possibly be any ambiguity about which book I’m talking about.

She gazes around innocently, looking at everything but the book.

“What is that, like the fourteenth time this year you’ve read it?”

“Twelfth,” she says, looking guilty. “But really, go to bed without me; I might be up for a while still. I have another fifty pages or so I need to finish before I can go to sleep. I just have to find out if Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy end up together.”

I look at her mournfully, quietly shut my laptop’s lid, and bid the both of them–wife and laptop–good night. My wife grudgingly nods, but doesn’t look away from Jane Austen’s pages. My RSS feeds don’t say anything either.

“Yes,” I mumble to no one in particular, as I slowly climb up the stairs and head for my toothbrush.

“Yes, they do end up together.”

Out of idle curiosity, I just spent a few minutes looking up the origin of the phrase “the narcissism of small differences.” Turns out it’s one of Freud’s many contributions to our lexicon, and originates in his 1917 article The Taboo of Virginity:

Crawley, in terms that are hardly distinguishable from those employed by psychoanalysis, sets forth how each individual is separated from the others by a “taboo of personal isolation” and that it is precisely the little dissimilarities in persons who are otherwise alike that arouse feelings of strangeness and enmity between them. It would be tempting to follow up this idea and trace back to this “narcissism of small differences” the antagonism which in all human relations we see successfully combating feelings of fellowship and the commandment of love towards all men.

…so there’s that question answered. As Freud goes, this is positively lucid prose; for context, the very next sentence is: Psychoanalysis believes that, in pointing out the castration complex and its influence on the estimation in which women are held, it has discovered one of the chief factors underlying the narcissistic rejection of women by men that is so liberally mingled with disdain.

And then there are lots of other little gems in the same article, like this one:

We know, however, that the first act of intercourse is by no means always followed by this behaviour; very often the experience merely signifies a disappointment to the woman, who remains cold and unsatisfied; usually it takes some time and frequent repetition of the sexual act before satisfaction in it for her too sets in.

Freud justifiably gets a lot of credit for revolutionizing the study of the mind, but it’s worth remembering that he also did a lot of cocaine.

Those last two posts were pretty dry, so here’s something to lighten the mood. Click to enlarge. The source, and more in the same vein, can be found here.

Since it’s grad school application season for undergraduates, I thought I’d repost some narrative tips about how to go about writing a personal statement for graduate programs in psychology. This is an old, old post from a long-deceased blog; it’s from way back in 2002 when I was applying to grad school. It’s kind of a serious piece; if I were to rewrite it today, the tone would be substantially lighter. I can’t guarantee that following these tips will get you into grad school, but I can promise that you’ll be amazed at the results.

The first draft of my personal statement was an effortful attempt to succinctly sum up my motivation for attending graduate school. I wanted to make my rationale for applying absolutely clear, so I slaved over the statement for three or four days, stopping only for the occasional bite of food and hour or two of sleep every night. I was pretty pleased with the result. For a first draft, I thought it showed great promise. Here’s how it started:

I want to go to,o grajit skool cuz my frend steve is in grajit and he says its ez and im good at ez stuff

When I showed this to my advisor he said, “I don’t know if humor is the way to go for this thing.”

I said, “What do you mean, humor?”

After that I took a three month break from writing my personal statement while I completed a grade 12 English equivalency exam and read a few of the classics to build up my vocabulary. My advisor said that even clever people like me needed help sometimes. I read Ulysses, The Odyssey, and a few other Greek sounding books, and a book called The Cat in the Hat which was by the same author as the others, but published posthumously. Satisfied that I was able to write a letter that would impress every graduate admissions committee in the world, I set about writing a second version of my personal statement. Here’s how that went:

Dear Dirty Admissions Committee,
Solemn I came forward and mounted the round gunrest. I faced about and blessed gravely thrice the Ivory Tower, the surrounding country, and all the Profs. Then catching sight of the fMRI machine, I bent towards it and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in my throat and shaking my head.

“Too literary,” said my advisor when I showed him.

“Mud,” I said, and went back to the drawing board.

The third effort was much better. I had weaned myself off the classics and resolved to write a personal statement that fully expressed what a unique human being I was and why I would be an asset to the program. I talked about how I could juggle three bean bags and almost four, I was working on four, and how I’d stopped biting my fingernails last year so I had lots of free time to do psychology now. To show that I was good at following through on things that I started, I said,

p.s. when I can juggle four bean bags ( any day now) I will write you to let you know so you can update your file.

Satisfied that I had written the final copy of my statement, I showed it to my advisor. He was wild-eyed about it.

“You just don’t get it, do you,” he said, ripping my statement in two and throwing it into the wastepaper basket. “Tell you what. Why don’t I write a statement for you. And then you can go through it and make small changes to personalize it. Ok?”

“Sure,” I said. So the next day my advisor gave me a two-page personal statement he had written for me. Now I won’t bore you with all of the details, but I have to say, it was pretty bad. Here’s how it started:

After studying psychology for nearly four years at the undergraduate level, I have decided to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. I have developed a keen interest in [list your areas of interest here] and believe [university name here] will offer me outstanding opportunities.

“Now go make minor changes,” said my advisor.

“Mud,” I said, and went to make minor changes.

I came back with the final version a week later. It was truly a masterpiece; co-operating with my advisor had really helped. At first I had been skeptical because what he wrote was so bad the way he gave it to me, but with a judicious sprinkling of helpful clarifications, it turned into something really good. It was sort of like an ugly cocoon (his draft) bursting into a beautiful rainbow (my version). It went like this:

After studying psychology (and juggling!) for nearly four years at the undergraduate level (of university), I have decided to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. Cause I need it to become a Prof. I have developed a keen interest in [list your areas of interest here Vision, Language, Memory, Brain] and believe [university name hereStanford Princeton Mishigan] will offer me outstanding opportunities in psychology and for the juggling society.

“Brilliant,” said my advisor when I showed it to him. “You’ve truly outdone yourself.”

“Mud,” I said, and went to print six more copies.

…I’m not dead, just applying for jobs and trying to get some papers out of the door. Regular posting (meaning, weekly, as opposed to monthly) will resume soon! Until then, go read something interesting. Like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this.

Okay, none of those ‘this’es actually link to anything. I was going to do a quick link dump, and then realized that in my current fatigued state, digging up six interesting links would be an epic undertaking. Like, elephant-lifting epic. So no links today. But I promise I’ll make up for it when I’m less tired. We’ll go to Disney World, eat ice cream, and gossip about what all the other science bloggers are wearing. There will be blood posts!

I like the PLoS journals, including PLoS ONE, a lot. But it drives me a little bit crazy that the list of PLoS ONE subjects includes things like Non-Clinical Health, Nutrition, and Science Policy, while perfectly respectable subjects like Psychology, Economics, and Political Science are nowhere to be found (note: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Nutrition, just that there’s also nothing wrong with Psychology).

I can sort of understand the rationale; PLoS ONE is supposed to be a science journal, and I imagine the editors feel that if they opened up the door to the aforementioned categories, some of the submissions they’d start receiving would have tenuous or nonexistent relationships to anything that you could call science. But in practice, PLoS ONE already does take articles in all of those subjects–and many others. And what then happens, no doubt, is that the editorial board has epic battles over which of the 40-odd existing subjects is going to become the proud beneficiary of a completely unrelated article.

I imagine it goes down something like this:

Editor A: Look, “Patriarchal principles of pop music in a post-Jacksonian era” is clearly an Epidemiology article. It’s going under Public Health and Epidemiology.

Editor B: Don’t be a fool. There isn’t a single word in the paper about health or disease. You’d know that if you’d bothered to read it. It obviously belongs under Mental Health.

Editor A: Absolutely not. Infectious Diseases, Pediatrics and Child Health, or Anesthesiology and Pain Management. Pick one. Final offer.

Editor B: No. But I’ll tell you what. Send it back to the authors, ask them to add a section on the influence of barbiturates and opiates on modern composition, and then we’ll stick it under Pharmacology.

Editor A: Deal.

Lest you think I’m making shit up exaggerating, witness exhibit A: a paper published today by Araújo et al entitled “Tactical Voting in Plurality Elections”. To be fair, I don’t know anything about tactics, voting, plurality, or elections, so I can’t tell you if the paper is any good or not. It looks interesting, but I don’t understand much more than the abstract.

What I can tell you though with something approaching certainty is that the paper has absolutely nothing to do with Neuroscience–which is one of the categories it’s filed under (the other is Physics, which it also seems to bear no relation to, save for the fact that the authors are physicists). It doesn’t mention the words ‘brain’, ‘neuro-’, ‘neural’, or ‘neuron’ anywhere in the text, which is pretty much a necessary condition for a neuroscience article in my book. The only conceivable link I can think of is that it’s a paper about voting, and voting is done by people, and people have brains. But that’s not very compelling. Really, it should go under Political Science, or Economics, or Applied Statistics, or even a catch-all category like Social Sciences. Except that none of those exist.

Pretty please, PLoS ONE, can we get a Social Sciences section?

Let’s suppose you were charged with the important task of naming all the various subdisciplines of neuroscience that have anything to do with the field of research we now know as psychology. You might come up with some or all of the following terms, in no particular order:

• Neuropsychology
• Biological psychology
• Neurology
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Cognitive science
• Systems neuroscience
• Behavioral neuroscience
• Psychiatry

That’s just a partial list; you’re resourceful, so there are probably others (biopsychology? psychobiology? psychoneuroimmunology?). But it’s a good start. Now suppose you decided to make a game out of it, and threw a dinner party where each guest received a copy of your list (discipline names only–no descriptions!) and had to guess what they thought people in that field study. If your nomenclature made any sense at all, and tried to respect the meanings of the individual words used to generate the compound words or phrases in your list, your guests might hazard something like the following guesses:

• Neuropsychology: “That’s the intersection of neuroscience and psychology. Meaning, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive function.”
• Biological psychology: “Similar to neuropsychology, but probably broader. Like, it includes the role of genes and hormones and kidneys in cognitive function.”
• Neurology: “The pure study of the brain, without worrying about all of that associated psychological stuff.”
• Cognitive neuroscience: “Well if it doesn’t mean the same thing as neuropsychology and biological psychology, then it probably refers to the branch of neuroscience that deals with how we think and reason. Kind of like cognitive psychology, only with brains!”
• Cognitive science: “Like cognitive neuroscience, but not just for brains. It’s the study of human cognition in general.”
• Systems neuroscience: “Mmm… I don’t really know. The study of how the brain functions as a whole system?”
• Behavioral neuroscience: “Easy: it’s the study of the relationship between brain and behavior. For example, how we voluntarily generate actions.”
• Psychiatry: “That’s the branch of medicine that concerns itself with handing out multicolored pills that do funny things to your thoughts and feelings. Of course.”

If this list seems sort of sensible to you, you probably live in a wonderful world where compound words mean what you intuitively think they mean, the subject matter of scientific disciplines can be transparently discerned, and everyone eats ice cream for dinner every night terms that sound extremely similar have extremely similar referents rather than referring to completely different fields of study. Unfortunately, that world is not the world we happen to actually inhabit. In our world, most of the disciplines at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience have funny names that reflect accidents of history, and tell you very little about what the people in that field actually study.

Here’s the list your guests might hand back in this world, if you ever made the terrible, terrible mistake of inviting a bunch of working scientists to dinner:

• Neuropsychology: The study of how brain damage affects cognition and behavior. Most often focusing on the effects of brain lesions in humans, and typically relying primarily on behavioral evaluations (i.e., no large magnetic devices that take photographs of the space inside people’s skulls). People who call themselves neuropsychologists are overwhelmingly trained as clinical psychologists, and many of them work in big white buildings with a red cross on the front. Note that this isn’t the definition of neuropsychology that Wikipedia gives you; Wikipedia seems to think that neuropsychology is “the basic scientific discipline that studies the structure and function of the brain related to specific psychological processes and overt behaviors.” Nice try, Wikipedia, but that’s much too general. You didn’t even use the words ‘brain damage’, ‘lesion’, or ‘patient’ in the first sentence.
• Biological psychology: To be perfectly honest, I’m going to have to step out of dinner-guest character for a moment and admit I don’t really have a clue what biological psychologists study. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone refer to themselves as a biological psychologist. To an approximation, I think biological psychology differs from, say, cognitive neuroscience in placing greater emphasis on everything outside of higher cognitive processes (sensory systems, autonomic processes, the four F’s, etc.). But that’s just idle speculation based largely on skimming through the chapter names of my old “Biological Psychology” textbook. What I can definitively confidently comfortably tentatively recklessly assert is that you really don’t want to trust the Wikipedia definition here, because when you type ‘biological psychology‘ into that little box that says ‘search’ on Wikipedia, it redirects you to the behavioral neuroscience entry. And that can’t be right, because, as we’ll see in a moment, behavioral neuroscience refers to something very different…
• Neurology: Hey, look! A wikipedia entry that doesn’t lie to our face! It says neurology is “a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue, such as muscle.” That’s a definition I can get behind, and I think 9 out of 10 dinner guests would probably agree (the tenth is probably drunk). But then, I’m not (that kind of) doctor, so who knows.
• Cognitive neuroscience: In principle, cognitive neuroscience actually means more or less what it sounds like it means. It’s the study of the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive function. In practice, it all goes to hell in a handbasket when you consider that you can prefix ‘cognitive neuroscience’ with pretty much any adjective you like and end up with a valid subdiscipline. Developmental cognitive neuroscience? Check. Computational cognitive neuroscience? Check. Industrial/organizational cognitive neuroscience? Amazingly, no; until just now, that phrase did not exist on the internet. But by the time you read this, Google will probably have a record of this post, which is really all it takes to legitimate I/OCN as a valid field of inquiry. It’s just that easy to create a new scientific discipline, so be very afraid–things are only going to get messier.
• Cognitive science: A field that, by most accounts, lives up to its name. Well, kind of. Cognitive science sounds like a blanket term for pretty much everything that has to do with cognition, and it sort of is. You have psychology and linguistics and neuroscience and philosophy and artificial intelligence all represented. I’ve never been to the annual CogSci conference, but I hear it’s a veritable orgy of interdisciplinary activity. Still, I think there’s a definite bias towards some fields at the expense of others. Neuroscientists (of any stripe), for instance, rarely call themselves cognitive scientists. Conversely, philosophers of mind or language love to call themselves cognitive scientists, and the jerk cynic in me says it’s because it means they get to call themselves scientists. Also, in terms of content and coverage, there seems to be a definite emphasis among self-professed cognitive scientists on computational and mathematical modeling, and not so much emphasis on developing neuroscience-based models (though neural network models are popular). Still, if you’re scoring terms based on clarity of usage, cognitive science should score at least an 8.5 / 10.
• Systems neuroscience: The study of neural circuits and the dynamics of information flow in the central nervous system (note: I stole part of that definition from MIT’s BCS website, because MIT people are SMART). Systems neuroscience doesn’t overlap much with psychology; you can’t defensibly argue that the temporal dynamics of neuronal assemblies in sensory cortex have anything to do with human cognition, right? I just threw this in to make things even more confusing.
• Behavioral neuroscience: This one’s really great, because it has almost nothing to do with what you think it does. Well, okay, it does have something to do with behavior. But it’s almost exclusively animal behavior. People who refer to themselves as behavioral neuroscientists are generally in the business of poking rats in the brain with very small, sharp, glass objects; they typically don’t care much for human beings (professionally, that is). I guess that kind of makes sense when you consider that you can have rats swim and jump and eat and run while electrodes are implanted in their heads, whereas most of the time when we study human brains, they’re sitting motionless in (a) a giant magnet, (b) a chair, or (c) a jar full of formaldehyde. So maybe you could make an argument that since humans don’t get to BEHAVE very much in our studies, people who study humans can’t call themselves behavioral neuroscientists. But that would be a very bad argument to make, and many of the people who work in the so-called “behavioral sciences” and do nothing but study human behavior would probably be waiting to thump you in the hall the next time they saw you.
• Psychiatry: The branch of medicine that concerns itself with handing out multicolored pills that do funny things to your thoughts and feelings. Of course.

Anyway, the basic point of all this long-winded nonsense is just that, for all that stuff we tell undergraduates about how science is such a wonderful way to achieve clarity about the way the world works, scientists–or at least, neuroscientists and psychologists–tend to carve up their disciplines in pretty insensible ways. That doesn’t mean we’re dumb, of course; to the people who work in a field, the clarity (or lack thereof) of the terminology makes little difference, because you only need to acquire it once (usually in your first nine years of grad school), and after that you always know what people are talking about. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the whole point of learning big words is that once you’ve successfully learned them, you can stop thinking deeply about what they actually mean.

It is kind of annoying, though, to have to explain to undergraduates that, DUH, the class they really want to take given their interests is OBVIOUSLY cognitive neuroscience and NOT neuropsychology or biological psychology. I mean, can’t they read? Or to pedantically point out to someone you just met at a party that saying “the neurological mechanisms of such-and-such” makes them sound hopelessly unsophisticated, and what they should really be saying is “the neural mechanisms,” or “the neurobiological mechanisms”, or (for bonus points) “the neurophysiological substrates”. Or, you know, to try (unsuccessfully) to convince your mother on the phone that even though it’s true that you study the relationship between brains and behavior, the field you work in has very little to do with behavioral neuroscience, and so you really aren’t an expert on that new study reported in that article she just read in the paper the other day about that interesting thing that’s relevant to all that stuff we all do all the time.

The point is, the world would be a slightly better place if cognitive science, neuropsychology, and behavioral neuroscience all meant what they seem like they should mean. But only very slightly better.

Anyway, aside from my burning need to complain about trivial things, I bring these ugly terminological matters up partly out of idle curiosity. And what I’m idly curious about is this: does this kind of confusion feature prominently in other disciplines too, or is psychology-slash-neuroscience just, you know, “special”? My intuition is that it’s the latter; subdiscipline names in other areas just seem so sensible to me whenever I hear them. For instance, I’m fairly confident that organic chemists study the chemistry of Orgas, and I assume condensed matter physicists spend their days modeling the dynamics of teapots. Right? Yes? No? Perhaps my  millions thousands hundreds dozens three regular readers can enlighten me in the comments…