Metaphor

The dry business of acquisitions and mergers is given drama and clarity by this simple visual metaphor.

Those of you with a keener literary eye will have noted my heavy sprinkling of metaphor/analogy in my writing (and perhaps unintentionally comic occasions where they are extended beyond their elastic point, so they only lie limp in my text looking a bit silly [like now]).

Anyway, it's deliberate. Metaphors clear the corridors of our thinking and allow easy passage for arguments to glide down. They also improve your writing considerably.

Cognitive and Philosophy Wizard Daniel Hofstadter (and also author of the first book to ever be sold on Amazon.com) has called them "the core of cognition" (in Gentner et al., 2001. For pedants out there he was strictly speaking talking about analogy, but metaphor is a type of analogy).

Consider the differences between these two attempts to capture what the word 'greenwashing' means:

1. Greenwashing is a term that is used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service

2. Greenwashing is when you "put a lettuce in the window of a butcher's shop and declare that you are now 'turning vegetarian'" (John Grant)

Although the first is more accurate, the second gives you the same gist but with much more satisfaction, clarity and gumption.

The reason I bring it up is because metaphor is not only for use over in the English department. Science papers and books frequently employ it to satisfying and "aah, now I get it!" effect.

At its best a metaphor should promote understanding beyond that of literal text, affording a deeper grasp on the issue. At its worst metaphor is deployed for flowery effect at the expense of crisp communication.

There's a paper I remember (but not well enough to cite) that was explaining the drawbacks of neuroimaging's resolution and it likened the situation to flying over a city a night, being able to see the lights below but being completely oblivious to the economics, politics and culture going on beneath.

This isn't just showing off because it shoehorns understanding and makes metaphorical predictions (we need to get down at the grassroots (cognitive and neuronal) levels to understand these other things).

In exams, slipping in a metaphor every now and again can pull the point you are making into sharp focus, significantly polish your communication and enhance the marker's understanding. Now, you may think I am getting a bit ahead of myself suggesting this as a way to improve your writing because it's irrelevant right now (you want to worry about that in May/June).

It isn't. In revision, using metaphor can greatly enhance your own understanding and memory of something because it forces you to chuck an idea about between two different modes. As a result it forces you to understand it at a deeper level, and when you codify at a deeper level you remember better (Slamecka and Graf, 1978). And, the really good ones should let you think more creatively and critically, which you'll need for the top marks.

When you are writing your notes try and think up useful metaphors and analogies because it will enliven the process, forge deeper memories and make you better thinkers.

Neuropsychiatry Questions

laszlo-photo @ Flickr

GENERAL

What is neuropsychiatry and should it take the place of the two sub-disciplines that already exist. Why?

The mind and brain are separate entities. Assess the validity of this statement and indicate any implications your conclusions have for medical science.

Are psychiatric 'illnesses' real?

Why should psychiatry symptoms be evaluated from a neurological perspective?

What is functional illness and why is it no longer a useful construct?

You are writing a letter to the Dean of Medicine, explaining why psychiatry and neurology should be combined both for research and for teaching. What would your argument be?

People with schizophrenia, eating disorders, depression, addition etc are not really ill in the true medical sense. Discuss.

What is wrong with psychiatry and neurology as they are currently?

A leading physician announces that mental illness must be understood by "chemicals, culture and everything in between". What might she mean? Illustrate your answer with clinical examples.

SPECIFIC

Psychosis

Is psychosis something made up by the patient?

What can visual hallucinations tell us about schizophrenia?

Hallucinations are nothing more than creations on the part of the ‘sufferer’ for attention. Discuss this in the light of recent findings.

Psychosis – Somatic Hallucinations

What can we hope to learn from phantom limb syndrome?

How do somatic hallucinations speak to the mind-brain problem?

Schizophrenia is a functional disorder. With reference to somatic hallucinations, assess this statement.

Why are discussions of somatic hallucinations useful to proponents of neuropsychiatry?

Eating disorders

Discuss the pattern of change in the scientific approach toward eating disorders?

How has neuroimaging helped researchers to map the neural correlates of eating disorders? Is it enough to understand it?

Eating disorders are a purely social phenomenon. Discuss.

What is known about the aetiology of eating disorders?

Mood

Is there any evidence suggesting that mood disorders can be caused by brain pathology? If so, why wont this account be complete?

Do depression and mania have an organic basis?

How can the occurrence of depression and mania be affected by brain function?

Are individuals with severe depression just malingerers?

Somatoform disorders

Conversion disorder is ideopathic. Discuss this statement in light of recent neuroscientific findings.

What does Vuilleumier’s (2005) review tell us about conversion disorder?

The DSM-IV claims somatoform disorders are those without an organic basis. Is the DSM-IV correct?

What is body dysmorphic disorder, is it a stand-alone disorder and what ways might one go about treating it?

Why are recent findings on conversion disorder so valuable to the case for neuropsychiatry?

Dissociative disorders

Dissociative disorders are alterations in the subjective nature of consciousness. How does recent research into their nature speak to the mind/brain debate?

Dissociative and somatoform disorders are traditionally as functional disorders. Are they?

Anxiety

Do anxiety disorders only develop because of socio-cultural factors?

Anxiety disorders only have biological causes. Discuss.

What are the biological mechanisms that cause anxiety disorders?

Why might a person have anxiety disorder?

Obsession

Obsessive-compulsive behaviour can be observed as a symptom and personality trait. Discuss.

Are we accurate to infer that damage to the right hemisphere is the cause of OCD?

Discuss the mediatory effects of neurochemicals in OCD. How does this speak to the issue OCD's status as a mental illness?

Religion

Is religion rooted in the brain?

Religion is an evolutionary adaptation with a neural basis. Discuss.

Question Masters: Some help...

rock_alien @ Flickr

You need to become question masters, experts in plucking latent questions out of the academic air. I thought you might like some help. I'll be releasing all the ones I came up with for Level 3. All forthcoming posts on this will be tagged with the label "question spotting".

Preventing stress

Naboo beats all the stress management techniques out there with the kitten in a barrel routine

It's highly likely that you're going to feel some stress in the coming weeks. A little is good: it sharpens your thinking and fuels your motivation; but too much is bad.

Not is it only bad for all the malaise it causes but it damages your working memory (e.g., Morgan et al., 2006), which you need to think and solve problems with, and your ability to solidify long-term memories (e.g., Chen et al., 2008), which you obviously need to remember course content. Also, "[y]our IQ plummets. Your creativity, your sense of humor — all of that disappears. You're stupid." according to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell author of CrazyBusy. You may not need a sense of humour to write psychology essays (but it's probably a good thing to have to get through the revision process) but you'll want your creativity firing otherwise those top marks are out of reach.

Now there's lots out there on ameliorating stress. I might do a series of posts on a couple of things later. But for now I think it's better to think about what causes it. When it comes to exams, stress is the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

If you want a First, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to be monstrous. If you don't care what you get, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to fairly low.

Unfortunately, once the gap gets wide enough it'll start growing all by itself because stress deleteriously (ooh get me!) affects thinking and memory, precisely those things you need to narrow the gap. It's a nasty place to be.

To keep this distance to a minimum, you could always cut what you want your degree classification to be - but this is only a strategy for loafers. The alternative is to i) give yourself loads of time (i.e. start now), ii) draw up a good timetable so you can monitor and manage the 'stress distance' and iii) share out some of the immense requisite research.

This may sound achingly obvious but the obvious remains in the theoretical realm for some people until it is too late. There will be people (re)reading this post in a month's time and kicking themselves. Don't be one of them.

How to Work - Three

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue by filmmaker Cao Guimaraes and artist Rivane Neuenschwander. Following the Carnival, the colourful confetti become the ants' treasure and we can watch them as they go about their collective labour (a little help was needed to get them excited by soaking the paper in either pork-fat or honey). There is also some nice tinkling added to the soundtrack. Currently at the Tate Modern.

If an alien arrived on earth one of the first things it would note about our species was how much time we spent with each other. 'Humans are social creatures' it might jot down. Perhaps if our alien had been observing the majority of students doing their revision it would have added to that, "...except when revising."

But it shouldn't have to be this way.

Of course, you get the degree from your own work, you sit the exams by yourself and you need to do the thinking for yourself. I am not trampling on this idea. What's silly is when there is much to be gained, academically and emotionally, from including within your revision a perfectly legitimate social element.

What does this mean? It means chatting. It means spending lots of your revision hours chewing over the academic cud with other people. You'll be surprised at how digestible material is afterwards.

However, to do this, a lot of you will need to shake off the intense privacy with which you guard your ideas. Generally speaking, there is more to be gained from discussion than there is to be lost. And besides, you can keep the really original and creative cards close to your chest. But, I'd bet you'll find yourself with way more of those type of cards if you discuss material frequently and fervently with course mates.

I didn't do this in second year very much. Revision was lonely and painful. I did it in third year with the co-authors of the 'revision bible' and other lots of people on the course and revision suddenly got a whole lot better, and, dare I say it, at times enjoyable. Yeah, enjoyable.

I estimate that I reduced my 'sit-down revision time' by 30% by ironing out the creases in understanding over a beer, meal or walk on the Downs. What can take you 20 minutes in the library, takes you 20 seconds in a group to understand. Also, things seems to stick to memory more easily when they are spoken compared to when they are read. So, there are academic reasons for doing this.

Rather nicely, this idea has very recently been supported in the literature. In February, a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that social interaction (as little as 10 minutes) improved intellectual performance.

In related stuff, more social contact is correlated with well-being (Sinha & Verma, 1990; Triandis et al., 1986); its absence is marked by depression (Gladstone, Parker, Malhi, & Wilhelm, 2007). Doing stuff together is better for the psyche.

In groups of friends, discussing things will probably occur organically. This post isn't really for that group. However, there will be lots of you who are doing this alone. This is for you then: You'll understand and remember more - and be happier, which counts for a lot - when you exploit your brain's natural affinity with social intercourse. Go and chat a psychologist up...

Eating Disorders

Here's a documentary on eating disorders that some of you might find useful. Info on it here.

How to note: the review

(ttstam @ Flickr)

A review: the closest thing to a magic potion when revising

If you have done stage 1, you’ll know what a course is about before you dive into it.

I would say next on the agenda is to organise the course up into its different bits, leaving out anything you have decided to jettison. Now you have your work cut out.

Choose an area and head to PubMed (or alternative), type in the area you have settled on, add “+ review” on the end (e.g. “eating disorders + review”) and press 'Search'. Sort the results so as to have the most recent first.

With a bit of luck, what you'll have now is a review paper*. A review paper is an exciting thing; the more recent, the more exciting. It’s exciting because it means less work: someone much more familiar with the material has done all the legwork for you.

So, to carry on with the eating disorders (neuropsychiatry) example here's what I'd do:

One, I'd remind myself of the course blueprint, it’s all in the brain, but the brain isn’t everything. Two, as I read through the review paper, I'd have my senses sharpened to spot 'neural footprints'...it appears there is a lot of evidence showing right hemisphere damage. That’s something to note. But I'm also on the look out for more holistic explanations than this though. What is causing these right hemisphere lesions? There’s a load of stuff on methodology, and its at a grim level of detail. I’ll skim over that. Stuff on DSM-IV and how it’s being a bit behind, blah blah blah; interesting but irrelevant. Ah! A big juicy section on external causes…media effects…introduction of TV in a remote village causes increased incidence of eating disorders, that’s a good one!...both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy seem to have efficacy...and so on.

Hopefully, you get the idea. Find a review, call to mind the course blueprint and allow it be a light. Note what it illuminates and ignore the dark bits.

*If there are no reviews available, find a few recent experimental papers; their introductions should act as mini-reviews. Compare and contrast though because that way you tease out the picture and cancel out the researchers’ selection bias.

How to note: the blueprint

raisindetre @ Flickr
Architects don't plan for every brick, but without their blueprint work cannot begin.

You are a manager putting a team together for a job. There is a budget that restricts you from hiring all candidates. Therefore, you need to be selective.

You could pick names out of a hat. Bad idea: your team’s performance won’t be optimal.

You could hire people with the best grades. Not bad, but how do you know that grades correlate with performance on the job?

You could hire people with the best skills for the job. Very sensible. Of course, this means knowing what the job entails.

So it is with note-taking: you have a surplus of candidates – information – and a budget – limited time. Selection is required - and to do this optimally you need to know what 'the job entails'.

What this means is that before sitting down and even so much as opening a paper, you need to understand the key themes of the course, what it's about, the major idea(s) it's discussing.

Ploughing into your note-taking without this will mean you will be wasting time and memory on information that may be irrelevant.

Before doing anything I used to write this question:

WHAT IS THE POINT?

This isn’t some insight into my bleak emotional state during exams. Rather, asking ‘What is the point’ is a way to program your theoretical sat-nav, restricting access to routes you don’t need to visit and showing you the sorts of things to look out for.

You should be able to pack down a course’s themes into a page of notes, diagrams, photos, and maybe even videos if you are a digital monkey and then further into a few pithy sentences to remember. I called this the course blueprint.

Here are three examples of course themes (as I intuited them) from my final year:

Neuropsychiatry:
1) The brain is everything 2) The brain is not enough.

The metonymical conundrum means everything comes down to the brain (if attended to); all psychiatric disorders can be explained in neural terms (eventually). The second part means this is not enough: these disorders need to be explained holistically (genetic, neural, personal, social, cultural etc) in order to be fully understood and treated optimally.

Human Factors:
1) Know thyself 2) EEEEE

This means if we understand human capabilities and limitations (through psychology) we can design systems and products that are easier to use, easier to learn, more efficient, error-resistant and enjoyable.

Developmental Disorders:
1) Is language is an egg? 2) What flavour is it?

Here I was getting at the question of whether language was innate (an egg) or not. (Language is an omelette – a bit of nature a bit of nurture). The second question was about the flavour of language processing – domain specific or domain general (again, I think probably a bit of both).

So, stage one of note-taking: know what the course is about, don’t just plunge straight in trying to learn all the facts. Write it out. Reduce it down. Once that’s done you are ready to go off and actually do focused, useful, efficient revision.

How to Work - Two

margolove @ Flickr

In How to Work - One we cleaned the road of distractions. In this post, I'll talk about getting the best mileage.

I tried to have a look around to find something in the literature on concentration span, an optimal time, something like that. I cant find anything. Sorry. Then again there probably isn't an optimal one because it's gonna depend on you and the task at hand.

But I do have some advice on concentration. Instead of working to a time, work to a goal. Set yourself the task of doing 'up to this point in this topic', then take your break.

The advantages of doing this over heading out of the library for a break constantly are twofold. First, you will get more done. Continuous breaks can be unnecessary and costly in terms of time.

Secondly, you can make your dopamine system do its funky dance by setting it up to expect the reward of a break and then giving it that reward after you have achieved your goals. You can be both Pavlov and the dog.

When you do this you will flood yourself with a satisfying little boost as opposed to being in that constant state of unfinished business, which comes with taking timed breaks. I think this is vital for keeping the spirits up during tough times, as well as reinforcing you to keep on working.

In a geekier moment, I did test this out. I spent two days working in 45 minute slots, taking 15 minute breaks, and two days just working to goals. Of course my quasi-experiment is horribly subjective and open to expectancy effects, but I did feel I got more done and enjoyed things more when working to goal.

If your concentration is still dragging:

• drink water;
• have peppermint;
• cool down (e.g., Fine & Kobrick, 1978; Gafafer, 1974), for complex tasks especially heat seems to have a bad effect, (e.g., Carlson, 1961);
• get some more sleep (I'll probably do a whole post on sleep at some point);
• keep your blood sugar levels up with complex carbs (Scholey et al, 2001; Hoyland et al, 2008) not short-lived rubbish (I'll probably do a whole post on eating at some point);
• cut out crap (stuff with additives) from your diet (Although this study is with children, additives in their diet did concentration a big disservice);
• add stuff into your diet, including magnesium, B-complex vitamins (folic acid and choline), omega 3 fatty acids and zinc, all of which have been shown to maintain a good attention span;
  
• meditate - work at the University of Kentucky has shown there are psychomotor benefits to dabbling in a bit of brief meditation;
• if you know of any more add them in as comments below...
  

Soul balm

I have blogged about listening to music during revision here. The headline: don't do it.

But for when you're not revising and feel like relaxing, I have created tag-mashup playlist (basically, automatically selected songs based on descriptions) of hopefully emollient music that you can stream from the 'music cloud', courtesy of the great LastFM. I haven't listened to each song, so no judging me! It's now over there on the side now, underneath the book store >>>

There are about 150 tracks in there at the mo, which the widget wont show. It plays a shuffled selection from this. Refresh the page to re-shuffle. If you would like a track added, just write who it's by and what it's called in the comments and I'll add it.

How to Work - One

A few of you have asked questions about effective ways to work. So I am starting a series of posts on that subject.

We start with the Milk Desk (pictured), which takes the increasingly ubiquitous Jonathan Ive approach to design and deploys it in a desk. Quite a beauty isn't it? See the slick website here.

The thing about the desk is that it is totally devoid of distractions and this is the first rule of how to work.

Turn the phone off and close Facebook. Put away your magazines and gadgets. Hide the biscuits and finish the tea. Be ruthlessly brutal in dispensing with things you know might distract you.

If your need for Internet distractions is close to pathological (like mine), try blocking web pages you know you might want to visit (Facebook, Gmail, BBC News, etc) using this.

Do what needs to be done to achieve minimalist basics. This is because distractions mean interruption. And interruption is a kick in the cognitive nuts. Interruptions mean you’ll take longer to get back to where you were and you’ll also make more mistakes doing so. (See my other blog for a more extensive article on interruption or have fun with this beast.)

Not only is interruption the hand that knocks all your papers out your hand, it is also is bad for memory formation, which is clearly bad news during revision. In Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction, a paper in PNAS, the authors report that multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn. The more complex the topic, the more attention it needs and the more memory suffers if you split your attention doing other things. See this article for a summary of the paper.

You might think distractions lubricate the painful and unnatural process of revision, but in reality they are just diluting its potency and augmenting it duration. Be strict with yourself; work more intensely and you'll work less.

Table of Contents

waterlilysage @ Flickr

If you go ahead and write a revision bible either by yourself (good luck) or collectively (better idea), a handy thing to have is a table of contents so that you can quickly find information. Making one manually is like stapling your post-it notes to your legs: pointless and painful. Microsoft word can make you one in a breeze. Here's how:

1. Write your revision notes making sure to head everything with a good numbering structure. I would avoid using the autonumber function in Word just give each heading a place within your number structure and type it manually. For example,

1.Neuropsychiatry
1.1 Somatic Hallucinations
1.1.1 Areas within a topic (e.g. Phantom Limb Syndrome)
1.1.1.1 Highly specific areas (e.g. Background, Causes, Treatment etc)

2. Once you have written your notes, click INSERT>TOOLBARS>OUTLINING. You should get a new toolbar.

3. Highlight a particular heading and in the drop-down box select which level is needed according to the numbering structure. For example:

LEVEL 1: The Module (e.g. Neuropsychiatry)
LEVEL 2: The Topic (e.g. Somatic Hallucinations)
LEVEL 3: Areas within a topic (e.g. Phantom Limb Syndrome)
LEVEL 4: Highly specific areas (e.g. Background, Causes, Treatment etc)

4. Locate the place in your document where you want to put the table of contents and then click INSERT>REFERENCE>INDEX AND TABLES

5. In the window that appears click on the TABLE OF CONTENTS tab. This should be the second in from the left. Tweak anything you feel like or leave it alone and just press OK.

6. Bingo. You're done.

(If you make any changes to the document and want to update the table of contents click UPDATE TOC in the Outline Toolbar you added).

Here is a document for you to have a play with. This is what it should look like after adding the TOC. For those interested in seeing what a monster TOC looks, this is the one from my revision bible. Just in case it totally overwhelms you, I want to quickly add that it represents the work of three people over a month and a bit.

Two thousand and eighting

Referencing the most recent research immediately says to the marker that you have had a scoot around the literature and are at the cutting edge. It's so impressive and will give markers a nice warm feeling.

The only way a "(2008)" can be topped in your essay is with an "(in press)". That said, you can probably beat that with an "(in preparation)"; you're so in the groove you're citing papers that haven't yet been finished.

That's the major reason I have put the "Cutting edge" links over in the top right. They are updated automatically based on syndicated content taken direct from research groups or universities' news outlets. There might be the occasional oddity but all the research is hot off the press and hopefully there will be an occasional gem that makes you think, 'Ooh this would be great in...".

Where the 'Cutting Edge' links fall short, use PubMed or whatever you use to search and then sort the results so that the most recent is first. I believe you can also set up automated emails based on search terms using PubMed, so you are informed when anything new comes out.

The other neat thing about the most recent papers is that the first couple paras of the introduction should (if it is any good) bring you up to speed on the literature, including smoothing out any confusions that you may be getting upset over in older papers. So if you are getting in a muddle about things (which is normal) head for a recent paper to see if it can help.

Concentrate there, not here

Hard way leads to a bright end. Easy way leads to dark end. Make a choice.
Thanks to darkroom11 @ Flickr for this and the quotation

I am the most guilty of this. I stay on an area I love for ages and forget about stuff I don't like so much. The problem is exams are blind to your affections and dislikes.

It's tempting to stay on an area you are sound on or did your coursework essay on because there is no anxiety about the content.

So be careful not to get sucked in to the areas that give you comfort. Rather, give the ones that you are less confident on but carry equal weight your attention.

Your mind may not like it now, but it will when that exam question on your favorite area fails to show up.

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.

Brain models

(hurleygurley @ Flickr)

Found this while pottering about on Amazon. Might be useful for getting neuroanatomy straight in your heads (that's a really weird sentence if you overthink it). There are more brains to play with if you scroll down the Amazon page.

The Timetable

(offshore @ Flickr)

Revision in its literal translation is inaccurate for the first part of the task that lies ahead. This is because revision means re-visiting the stuff you have already looked at. Much of the stuff you will be looking at will be for the first time because you were absent/dozing/comatose during that lecture or you simply need to flesh out the skeleton it provided.

Thus, the first stage of your revision is research. This should not just be the blind copying out of material. It should be active, involving lots of thinking about the material at hand. I think I'll do a post on note taking soon.

In the meantime, you'll need to get yourself sorted with a good timetable. This is absolutely vital. It should block off time for researching, then thinking, then learning. For example, you might say that by the end of the first week of the summer term you will have all the research completed. This then leaves you lots of time to organise your thoughts, write essay plans and start learning the material. That's what I did.

I had a look around for my old timetables but it wasn't to be: I must have binned them after exams. Instead, here are my Tables of Contents from Level 2 and Level 3. (I'll show you how to make a Table of Contents in the next few days). It might help you organise your time more effectively. Each subsection (e.g. L3: Psychosis –Auditory and Visual Hallucinations; L2: Philosophy of Science) probably took anything from half a day to two days to complete. Remember, before you freak out, this was a combined effort.

Make sure you leave some padding for overflow and that you give yourself plenty of time to relax and do other stuff. Pencil in your exam dates too, if they have been published yet. This will help you get a sense of how to allocate your time later on. It should also show you how there isn't a luxurious amount of time ahead that visions of May/June conjure up ('oh, it's in the summer - that's way off' kind of attitude).

For those of you who like to do it the digital way, Google Calendar works a treat and is out there in the 'cloud', so you can access it wherever you are and there's internet. Handy if you're roaming about.

Mind maps: Bubbl.us

The Beautiful Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman

I just came across this nifty webpage called Bubbl.us. Might be useful to those of you whole like making mind maps in your revision.

Nothing makes any sense!

He's confused too. You are not the only one.

The more you read the more confused you become. Areas start out fairly straight-forward and rapidly become mired in dizzying confusion; one research group thinks black, another says white, a third seems to be saying grey but you aren't quite sure. Then some old goat says that actually there is no colour at all. Argh! Nothing makes any sense!

This is one of the most annoying feelings in the world. An arresting dissatisfaction with your understanding, like being stuck inside a David Lynch film. I am confident that it will be horribly familiar to most of you from researching essays.

The bad news is that it's only going to get worse as you attempt to make sense of whole courses (effectively the same work you did for an essay multiplied by the number of different areas you revise multiplied by your number of courses.)

At school (and with many other degrees) the information you need to learn is well set out, the conclusions have been arrived at already and you just need to soak them up. With this degree things are a bit tougher and it doesn't feel good. You need to research heavily and then try and make sense of it all.

The result of all this fishing with no fish to show for it is the 'whatever effect'; so overwhelmed are you by conflicting, theories, evidence and conclusions that you throw your hands up and say 'Whatever. I am off to the pub.'

I think the 'whatever effect' is one of the principle sources of grit in the resentment-of-psychology oyster, which in addition to being an unpleasant state to be in is not conducive to good marks. Being excited is good.

Throwing in the towel, also holds people back from higher marks because of the barrier it presents to understanding. The 'whatever effect' begets poor essays.

If you are happy to settle for a muddied picture of material then you don't deserve more marks but if you are hungry for those shiny extra prizes, you will need to work through confusion and learn to tolerate ambiguity until the fog clears (and it will clear if you are determined enough). It's a change in mindset: from being defensive and quitting to persisting when everything seems negative. It sounds a bit new agey, like you should be air punching when you get out of bed in the morning, but this is an idea with empirical support and cognitive benefits.

It will be tough. You'll have to hang up your party heels and put down your pint. However, beyond the unpleasant time spent grappling with the literature is a nirvana of clarity, where high scoring skills like critical thinking and creativity can flourish.

The other thing to remember is that you are not alone in this. Sometimes work is desperately lonely but it need not be: active discussion with others is often a shortcut to better understanding.

So if you are feeling confused - and the degree is deliberately designed to engender a bit of bafflement - don't give up. If you are willing to sweat a little, chew it over with friends and try and make sense of this confusion, higher marks and more more enjoyment await you.

Question Masters

There are questions everywhere; you just need to find them.

Whether you decide to act as a lone wolf or as group (which I strongly recommend) in the research stages here is a skill that will serve you very well.

After you have finished writing about an area in your revision and while it is still alive in your mind simply write down some specific and general questions that could be asked of you.

This will train your thinking process, making you more sensitive to the arguments drifting about in the academic winds.

And it is crisp, crunchy argument that is crucial, way more important than coughing up a wet lump of unstructured facts you have learnt, which no one wants to deal with. Science is not about facts, it's about theories and how facts can be used in service of those theories. It's about understanding the most with the least, not about collecting the most. Exam questions will mostly get you do this - argue and explain - so try to guess what you might have to argue and explain before it is asked of you.

When you are trying to think about the sort of questions that might be asked look back to the previous exams (I cut out all the questions for a course, glued them onto a A4 page, blew them up on the photocopier and then drew links between similar questions).

Ask yourself, is there anything that keeps cropping up (e.g. Neuropsychiatry, how everything comes down to the brain; DDC, how the disorders can speak to the issue of the innateness of language; Human Factors, how taking into account human abilities and limitations is vital for better design and so on)?

Then there will be conspicuousness by absence; once you have mapped out what has been, you'll find yourself thinking about what hasn't. Kit hasn't asked anything on 'qualia' recently, Jan hasn't posed anything big on workload etc (these are examples not actual cases). Write down these missing areas because they may come up.

Another trick is to do theme extraction across a course. This may sound a bit ominous but you can cheat and scour the course notes for those telling titles or comments that wink at the bigger picture. Often lecturers will cram their first and final lecture with this kind of stuff - be sensitive to it.

For the specific questions you will just need familiarity with an area, which will come from writing your notes and discussing it with each other (note, doing both is the best way to get the question tree blossoming).

Think about questions (and their answers) all the time and come the exam you'll not only be able to identify the questions that suit you best but you will have been thinking about answers to them for months instead of those precious few minutes at the start.