Get excited!

It's an annoying fact of evolutionary carpentry that human memory is so resistant to academic learning and yet so happy to soak up other things, like the plot of a film. We feel this difference intimately. Extracting a paper's details is hard. Absorbing a film's plot is easy.

Yet, when stripped down to their essentials, the amount of naked, quivering data in a paper and in a film are comparable. Both have antecedents, names, dates, a logical sequence and conclusions. Nevertheless, we pick up the film's details collaterally, whilst the paper takes a bit of cognitive mastication. Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn papers like we acquire the minutiae of a movie?

I think you can get close. Whilst a film undoubtedly unfurls more easily into the channels of memory than a paper - exploiting all those things our minds are very good at (face recognition, mapping social relationships, organising narratives of events etc) - there is another ingredient: excitement. When you watch a film you are stimulated and interested; a paper may seem like an ordeal. The latter has to change.

Getting interested

I am fully cognizant that excitement and interest can't just be turned on and off when you feel like it. However, the renaissance of research into that curious emotion, interest, has told that things are interesting when they are:

1. high in "novelty–complexity...which refers to evaluating an event as new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, or obscure" (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)
2. accessible enough that "[P]eople feel able to comprehend them and master the challenges that they [the novelty-complexity] pose (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)." (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)

New papers and the ideas they house are likely to be new to you in the research stages of your revision and some are undoubtedly going to be complex. The first ingredient of interest is there.

This second point means that experts can be interested in things that cause novices to turn off because they have the knowledge to comprehend them.

This is important because the major reason I think people give up and get bored with experimental psychology is because they haven't put the groundwork in. If you enter new, complex stuff without the ability to understand it you will get bored.

The way to understand and get interested in this stuff is to understand the story leading up to it. This can only be done by voracious reading to acquire the 'big picture', which ironically may be rather dull.

However, once you master understanding you arrive at a lovely self-fulfilling cycle: the more you are interested by new, complex material, the more you learn about it, the more you are interested by new, complex material.

Bottom line: for interest to grow you need to feed it with a bit of boredom. In the vast majority of cases it will arise after hard, unexciting work when all confusion peals away and the elegant beauty of an area is revealed and it becomes interesting.

Extinguishing dislike

On the other hand, negativity towards your subject can be quashed and should be whenever you feel it creeping in. Remind yourself of what a fascinating subject yours is, both per se and relative to most other degrees. You are lucky to be studying it. If ever you forget this, peer over the partition in the library and see what your neighbour is working on.

Modern psychology or cognitive neuroscience is providing answers to all sorts of questions that have had philosophers scratching and pacing for millennia. Star Trek was wrong: space isn't the final frontier, we are. Our fantastically complex brains and behaviour are the most interesting bit of the unknown.

In an article in TIME, Pinker said "Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings." He was talking about evolution, but the point still stands. The mind has a lot of naïve impressions about itself. Overcoming them to find out how we humans tick is one of the most important and interesting pursuits of modern intellectual inquiry.

As you enter this revision and examination period you'll need to shrug off the 'Erg work. Isn't it shit' attitude and take on the spirit of the badges at the top of this blog. Get really excited about this subject, all the gems its has to offer and the possibility to be really knowledgeable in it. If you don't it's just going to be academic self-laceration over the next few months.

At worst, with all that knowledge you'll have interesting things to say and the cool blade of science with which to cut down others' naïve ideas about the human mind. At best, your interest will pay dividends in extra marks because you'll spend longer learning, studying and reading (and doing so more deeply) and lay down better memories (see Silvia, 2006). Either way, you improve something.

What I can be certain of though is that if you are intrigued by your degree, you'll start to feel that the effort required for all that learning ahead of you is magically lifted away. Suddenly references will start appearing in your mind without having to sit down and write them out twenty times, methodologies will etch themselves into you memory, and arguments will unfold themselves effortlessly.

This is both experience and fact talking. There is a thick wadge of evidence that shows if you are emotionally invested in material you'll learn it more easily and it will stick for longer (e.g. LeDoux, 2002; or for a fairly recent review see Labar and Cabeza, 2006). And, if you are positive about learning you'll out-perform those just huffing along (Dweck, 2006).

Instead of mediocrity, seek excellence in psychology. Instead of feeling duty-bound, be excited to be learning about the newest stuff in the sexiest science. It will make everything a lot easier.