Do our foetal experiences help to do a PhD?

I stumbled across this talk by science writer Annie Murphy Paul on the intriguing field of foetal origins research. According to the scientific research, one’s learning begins while in the womb;  information about the environment of a pregnant mother is transmitted to the foetus, primarily through the digestive process and the senses, so that the foetus can develop the right qualities to survive in the outside world. (Unfortunately, the foetus doesn’t know that the mother’s environment is subject to change.)

I have been thinking  about the origin of phd topics and how they are influenced by the environment of the PhD student. There may be no connection but this talk made me wonder whether the skills required to do a PhD or experience that led to a PhD topic are the result in part or indirectly of any foetal learning.

It is interesting that Paul’s book on foetal origin research was written while she herself was pregnant. Did her experience as an expectant mother make her look more favourably on doing the research?  

A PhD topic as one node in a network of ideas

I started this blog because I was interested in that tweet of the imagination, that moment of inspiration, that lead to a phd topic. But, according to Steve Johnson, there is no such thing as the famed Archimedes moment. In reality, The badly-named environment is a network of human and non-human entities in contradiction and in dialectic to each other. One person’s tiny idea is, as Hegel would say, the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. Those big ideas – one amazing example that Johnson cites is the development of GPS – are really the collision of smaller ideas, that occur through the communication of people with their network.  We talk about the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head but the apple wouldn’t have fallen without gravity to pull it down, without Newton being in the right place and who knows what else happened from him to be there.  (Indeed, the ‘apple of the head’ is believed to be apocryphal, most likely developed to explain the moment that drew everything that Newton went through before together.) Catherine Malabou would have described this idea as le voir venir (to see what is coming). In this video, Johnson refers to a number of famous innovations and the network,behind them and explains why coffee shops are a part of writing a PhD. It turns out that they are a part of our societal DNA. But it also raises a good and pedantic question: why is the outcome of a PhD called a thesis when it should surely be a synthesis?

I have just realised that through this post and the previous one that this blog is  part of a larger network of researchers.

Elizabeth Gilbert on the spiritual origin of creativity

Sometimes, being creative feels like an overflowing river bursting its banks, granting fruitfulness to the land. At other times, it can be like trying to get blood from a stone. A common piece of advice for being creative is the important of writing regularly – the more you do it, the easier it becomes. There is some truth in this. After all, that is how the brain works. Neuronal connections become stronger each time the connection is repeated. So of course, one would not want to dispute neurobiological research. But I can testify to the argument of writer Elizabeth Gilbert, speaking at TED, that creativity is not the result of a purely mechanical process but something that is given to us from a force larger than ourselves.

Where did your “Archimedes moment” come from?

I started this blog because I was interested to in the “Archimedes moment” of PhD topics. It was my hypothesis that there was a connection between a PhD topic and the ‘environment’ of the researcher. The “Archimedes moment” – that moment of insight or aha or Eureka – was a moment of what Catherine Malabou calls le voir venir, where the researcher consciously or subconsciously looks back to what went before and then forwards to what is to come. Indeed, a number of contributors to this blog have often commented how the very act of writing a post was a cathartic process of making sense.

But one thing I have noticed during the course of my PhD is that there has not been just one moment of insight, there have been a whole series of them. I noticed I would have them at the oddest times – travelling on the bus or train, in church, watching TV and always when I was not thinking necessarily thinking about my PhD. In fact, sometimes I even had them while procrastinating. Perhaps the best example is my actual theoretical reading.  Sometimes, I would start reading a philosophical book and it makes no sense whatsoever so I put it to one side and get on with something else. I would then keep putting off going back to that book. But eventually I do and it makes perfect sense. It’s almost as if I had to do other things first, read other things first, come to certain points in my thinking first, before my brain was ready to process a particular philosophical text.

On the one hand, I would put this process of insight after preparation down to God. He knew, in his omniscience, what I needed to do and in what order; he had his teaching programme all mapped out, and if I tried to depart from it (unknowingly) it wouldn’t make sense. But then I wondered, how does he do that exactly? According to Jonah Lehrer, it’s done through the very structure of the human brain.

It turns out that there is no such thing as right-brained or left-brained people. Well, there are, but those people are suffering from brain damage. But the healthy person uses both sides of the brain. The left side focus on individual detail and the literal meaning of words and the right side focus on connections, underlying order, connotation and so on. We are physically reading or looking at some data, our brain will use the left side as far as possible to understand it but eventually it reaches an impasse where what we are looking at does not make sense. We give up in frustration and decide to do something else. But that’s when our right side kicks in. Having failed to understand on the surface, the brain goes under the covers and looks underneath the data. That’s when we get insight. It works when we are not actually ‘working’ because it is only reviewing the work that has already been done.  I’m going to hazard a guess but that must be why I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with a solution.

Reblog: PhD – A journey to where?

By Bernie Divall

Bernie had to get out the pigeon-hole she was put in as a child

If life really is about the journey, then I should be very happy. Last night I went to my eldest daughter’s parents’ evening, and was (yet again) overcome with joy at the realisation that she really is a proper all-rounder in her abilities. She excels at music, literacy, history, languages, science, art… Really, the only thing holding her back is a lack of confidence in maths, but I feel sure we can all live with that. And her grandfather is a mathematician, so help is at hand.

I’m immensely proud of the way we’ve brought our children up in terms of their education. We’ve always told them that working hard in the subjects they don’t find so easy is really important, and ultimately massively rewarding. For myself, this has been a direct reaction to my own upbringing, in which I ‘became’ a musician at around the age of 11, and was pigeon-holed accordingly throughout my secondary school education. I excelled at arts and languages, and giggled my way helplessly through the sciences. I remember my mum telling me that I wouldn’t be any good at sciences, because she wasn’t. So I stuck rigidly to being good at what I knew, and never explored other options. I do remember having a bit of a fascination with human biology, but never tried at the subject because it was challenging. My dad said that if I was going to fail anything, I should get a ‘U’ – this stands for ‘unclassified’, and meant the exam result would not appear on my ‘O’ level certificate (yes, I am that old. Older than GCSEs). So I got ‘A’s and ‘B’s in everything except Biology. In which I got a ‘U’. So indeed, it never appeared anywhere.

Off I went to music college on a scholarship, and I had fun in my pigeon-hole for a while, until I began to realise that it might not be enough for me to spend 8 hours of the day playing the bassoon. There was definitely more to life than what I felt was like stroking my own ego for the rest of my life. And at some point after that, several years later in fact, I found my way into midwifery. In which, as well as large amounts of psychology and sociology, I studied elements of human biology for three years. And far from being rubbish at it, I discovered that it was interesting – fascinating, even – and I could do it! I expect this was because I was now at a point in my life where I actually WANTED to learn such things as the circulatory system. After all, I’d be a pretty rubbish midwife if I didn’t know that.

Then, when I was doing my Research Masters, I had to deal with statistics. Maths had been my other big fear at school (despite, or perhaps because of, having a mathematician parent), and I was convinced that statistics (one of the Masters modules) would be utter hell. Again, I was wrong – it was actually quite fun, manipulating numbers until they did what I wanted them to.

And here I am now, doing a PhD. Who would have thought I could travel from the life of a classically trained bassoonist to the kind of thinking and writing I do now? My husband sometimes points out what a journey this has been, and I do feel a bit amazed at times. When I was 14, or 16, or even 18, I would never have considered ending up here. I probably wouldn’t have even known what a PhD was!

So I’m glad for the journey I’ve had the chance to make. Because my children can see that making a career choice at one point in your existence doesn’t restrict you to a lifetime of living that career. And I can see clearly why it’s such a good thing to encourage them to work at and get enjoyment from all the subjects available to them. I don’t regret my journey to this PhD life, and indeed I think that for me, it has been a necessary sequence of events to get me here. But I’m definitely a big believer in not being limited or restricted. Not in childhood, and not in adulthood either.

So I wonder where the journey will take me next? I’ve always had a hankering to be a hairdresser, but I think I’ll leave that one alone. What I’d really like to be is a writer. The thing is, I’m left wondering which path I need to take to get there? Decisions I’m making now will have a big impact on my ability to get to where I’d like to be. But then again, as I’ve learned along the way, there’s no such thing as a dead end.

This post first appeared under the title “Tell me again – how did I get here?” on PhD Life, a blog about the PhD student experience run by PhD students at Warwick University. Bernie Divall is currently in the second year of her doctoral studies, having left the crazy world of the NHS to become a midwife researching midwives. She’s funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and NHS East Midlands, so is on a tight schedule to finish in the three-year PhD sprint – the NHS may have absolutely no money left by her fourth year! Bernie is loving the PhD experience, although she has a tendency to get lost in a pit of ‘think’ at times.

Learning from Experience

By Dr Piers Steel

Every step takes Piers closer to something

Being the youngest child from a very smart family, I never originally saw myself as having a lot of potential. It always seemed my older siblings were made for greatness, not me. This lack of confidence contributed to being a mediocre undergraduate student. I had a minor in political science and a double major in philosophy and psychology. In the summer and on weekends I was in the Canadian military reserves as an artillery gunner, which didn’t exactly mesh well with my academic pursuits. My grades were uneven and reflected my interest in the topics. – I never really dug in because I never expected much from myself. Then, one day, this self-concept started to change. Albert Bandura, the king of self-efficacy research, found that direct experience is often the best way to improve self-confidence. It certainly was for me.

I took a mandatory statistics course and found I received the highest mark in the class. With such direct validation, perhaps I could indeed do better and aspire for more. Eventually, I settled on going for a graduate degree in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology and started to focus on something I truly desired. Some universities consider your entire undergraduate performance, which were now out of reach given a few truly dismal grades I received for a few courses. Others, however, consider only your last two years GPA. When I finally developed some focus, I had a good final fourth year as an undergraduate, but my previous third year wasn’t that impressive (I was still learning how to be a student). I ended up taking a few night school classes while working at a non-profit organization, Cheshire Homes (providing housing for the disabled), so I could have a good “fifth” year, making my last two years competitive. And they were. It was with joy and relief that I got accepted to the University of Guelph for their I/O psychology program.

My first semester was intimidating. I was still developing student skills that should have been honed long ago. In particular, my writing was still pretty awful; I find most people’s writing tend to be. Being able to write well is rare because good writing comes from two sources. First, you have to read other good writers. This develops your “ear,” so you can “hear” whether what you write flows. Second, mostly your ear tells you what you have written is clunky, requiring you to re-write again and again, which we don’t often leave time to do (and if this writing could be better, it is because I didn’t re-write sufficiently). Eventually, I did develop a decent set of academic skills, finishing my Masters with a competitive set of A+, A’s, and A-‘s. And then two disasters struck.

I had originally aspired to do my Masters on stereotype reduction, how to get people to see each other as individuals rather than rely on perceived group norms. After being told it was too ambitious for me and if I pursued it, I would be expelled from the program, I ended up settling on a much more modest piece: “The effects of inconsistencies among sex, gender, and job on promotion and pay raises.” It explored the effects of stereotypes rather than how to remove them. Unfortunately, a new professor at the University, Serge Desmarais, sat on my defense panel and was eager to show off to the rest of the faculty his knowledge. He challenged me on gender differences in causal attribution style, a fact I actually knew quite well. Completely oblivious to the social dynamics of the situation, I told him he was wrong. And I stuck with that position. He wanted to fail me right there and then.

After the defense, when I was still sticking with my opinion, a Dr. Kevin Kelloway (one of my favorite professors who raised my statistical knowledge to the next level) explained it to me this way: “Do you want to graduate or not?” I ended up including a section in my masters thesis that starts with my position “Predominantly, the results of these studies suggest that raters’ sex has no significant effect…” and then another shorter section to mollify Serge, “Despite the aforementioned results…” They accepted it, I passed, and I was all set to pursue my PhD. Or not.

I actually got “kicked” out the University of Guelph program at that point. I was not invited to continue on to my PhD. In truth, though, we all received the same treatment, that is my entire cohort. Incredibly, even my good friend Abe Schoenewolf, winner of the Kendall Award for best I/O paper, got the boot. Though our form letter didn’t say as much, thoughts were that they had already accepted almost the entire previous Masters cohort and they didn’t feel they had the resources to supervise anymore; whether this might have been a matter of funding or just convenience I don’t know. Still, it doesn’t stop the University of Guelph’s alumni association from asking donations from me. Abe and I were a little bitter at the time, but in the end it was for the best.

At this point, I took a two-year break from academia to try my hand at consulting. The economy was not great and, despite the Masters, I ended up doing a lot of administration. I appreciate Steve Stein from MHS giving me my first break though, where I did get to do some good research validating the Emotional Quotient Inventory. After that, I went to Occupational Studies Inc., where I got to hone skills at programming Excel macros (which actually have proved rather handy in academia). I thought I could continue this for another ten years and finally get to the level where I can do interesting work or go back and try for the at PhD. I was considering a lot of universities, but my soon-to-be wife suggested if I go back, I should do it right. University of Minnesota was top ranked in the world for I/O psychology, so that is where I would apply. In fact, it was the only place I applied. The application date came and past without an acceptance letter. A month goes by and then two. What would you do?

Perhaps because I really didn’t want to do another year of low-level consulting, I took an insane risk. On a quite limited budget, I flew myself down to St. Louis, where the annual Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference was. The entire University of Minnesota psychology department would be there. I figured out at which sessions Dr. John Campbell, the head of the department, would be presenting. I attended and ambushed him afterwards. I told him I wanted to attend his University, that my grades were good and so was my Graduate Record Examination scores. He told me that they were losing two professors this year and simply didn’t have resources to take on anyone new, at all.

Now, this is probably my life’s single most defining moment. Instead of giving up, I told him “So the problem is that you don’t have enough resources to supervise me.” He agreed. I asked him “Are there any other reasons besides resources or is this it?” He agreed there were no other issues. “So if I can get you more resources to help you supervise, you would accept me?” Smiling, he agreed to that too. And I was smiling too, as I knew how to get that resource for him.

To help fill out my application, I had volunteered for our own Canadian SIOP, arranging speakers to come in. One of these speakers was to be Richard Arvey, who was also an I/O psychologist except at the University of Minnesota business school (about 60% of us end up being at a business school, with me presently being one of them). He couldn’t come to Canada to speak, but I did have conversations with him, knew his research background and told him I had hoped to do research with him. After meeting with Dr. Campbell, I went to Dr. Arvey and simply told him that I was accepted to the University and we would be working together next year on his emotionality research program. “Great news!” said Rich. Then I communicated, there is just one thing necessary for you to do. Dr. Campbell is expecting you to contact him at his next session to confirm this arrangement. Instead of being at the business school, I would be at the psychology department, though helping you with your research. Dr. Campbell got his resources, Dr. Arvey got help with his research, and two weeks later I got the letter of acceptance.

Of note, the single biggest predictor of a successful PhD experience is your relationship with your supervisor. It is amazing how many potential graduate students are almost completely unfamiliar with the research program of who they plan to work with. Here are some suggestions. Make sure your supervisor is still publishing. Make sure your supervisor is publishing in an area somewhat similar to your own interests. Make sure your supervisor has publications with students. Rich is a good guy, who I indeed published with, as so is Dr. Campbell (who ironically was Rich Arvey’s supervisor himself back in the day).

My acceptance at the University of Minnesota was without funding, though. Consequently, I was TAing or teaching twice a semester to pay for my degree. Each time you teach a course or TA, the University of Minnesota forgives half of your tuition, so if I taught four undergraduate courses a year, I could afford the exorbitant and inflated “foreigner” tuition fee (I’m Canadian). I did this on top of all my course work, which at this point in my life I was now pretty good at. I took as many statistics course as I could handle, which is a good idea for anyone. It is much harder to pick up these concepts outside of a classroom than in. One of these statistical classes was Dr. Deniz Ones’ course on meta-analysis, a technique that shaped my research work immensely.

Unfortunately, my research and dissertation side of things were not as developed yet. I was noodling around several topics, including causal attribution and the happiness of nations, but was unfocussed. Also, if research is me-search, you are quite correct in that I procrastinated quite a bit at this time. Sometimes it would be a race to see who could finish the morning crossword, me or another grad student Meredith Vey. The loser had to have “The Picture of Shame” posted on their door for day, basically a poster we had creatively defaced. On my own, I played a lot of strategy games, like Civilization and Age of Mythology.

Teaching all those classes and TAing, however, paid off. I end up being a TA for Dr. Thomas Brothen. Dr. Brothen taught an introductory psychology course at the University of Minnesota’s General College, an institution designed specifically to increase the diversity of the university. Significantly, the class was administered through a Computerized Personalized System of Instruction, a nifty arrangement that allows students to progress through the course at their own pace but is well known for creating high levels of procrastination. In fact, procrastination is so much of a problem that students are repeatedly warned throughout the course about the dangers of delay. And here is the beautiful part. It being computerized meant that every stitch of work that the students completed had a time-date stamp exact to the second. He had a dataset that needed to be published and procrastination was a topic I was intimately familiar with.

With Dr. Brothen, I got my first publication and it was indeed on procrastination, “Procrastination and personality, performance, and mood.” I then followed up on the topic for my dissertation, doing a meta-analysis on the topic along with some new empirical work. Eventually, after a few rejections, I published the meta-analytic portion of my dissertation in Psychological Bulletin (the top social science journal) and the media went wild for it. Two little facts probably contributed to its rise. First, I mentioned it took about ten years thought I was planning it to be three. Second, was that I showed procrastination rates were rising. Based on the media attention, literary agents asked me if I wanted to write a book about it. I did and it became “The Procrastination Equation,” aimed at an audience who likes their self-help scientifically validated. It is a good book, it really is, and I wish I knew at the beginning of my academic career what I put inside it. Still, once your write a book, you are obliged to promote it, which I find an endless but necessary task. If you want your audience to find your book, you need to help your book find your audience.

And here I am. There is still a lot of research I want to do and few more books I want to write. Ironically, there are actually still two datasets from this time that Dr. Brothen and I developed that need publication. Better get back to it. And hope you like the book.

Pulling a thesis out of a hat

By Katy Inglis

Watching magic tricks as a child made Katy want to find out how they did it.

I was 10 years old the first time I watched a show by Derren Brown, a hugely popular British magician/showman.  At that age, I didn’t quite believe in magic any more – I knew there was some kind of trick to it somewhere, if I could only see it – but I couldn’t get over how even through the television I was duped repeatedly.

I became fascinated with the elements of showmanship he employed, particularly the use of non-verbal cues to misdirect an audience’s attention.  As a child, that meant I started devouring books on body language.  (I should add that I have always been hugely driven academically, and I love to learn for the sake of learning.  Even when I was 10).  It became something of a hobby for me to learn about these non-verbal messages we use, but when it was time for me to apply to university, the possibility of studying Psychology hadn’t crossed my mind.

Originally, I applied to do Law.  I was young and influenced by the earning potential – what can I say, my academic morals weren’t quite established then.  However, meeting my boyfriend in the same year I was meant to do my Highers (Scottish A-Levels to everyone else) meant that not quite as much studying got done as was necessary and I didn’t make the cut.  Desperate to go to university, I applied to do Psychology and, happily, was accepted.

Doing Psychology as an undergraduate added a new depth to my hobby.  I started learning about the motivations for human behaviour and began to focus my reading about non-verbal cues on deception.  I was fascinated with how people could lie without saying a word.  I continued to watch Derren Brown on TV and added more shows to my repertoire, like Lie to Me, which hit screens in 2009 and introduced me to the legend that is Paul Ekman.  I have told this story to several people who have exclaimed I just like to watch TV, which – although somewhat true – is a little unfair.  I’m aware of the limits of these programmes and the artistic license they employ to create a good story, but their influence on my life is pronounced; I wouldn’t be doing this PhD without them.  For that reason, I can’t tell my story fully without telling you about them.  (And as an aside, if you’ve never seen either – get watching!)

More slowly than I like to admit – given the seemingly obvious connection in hindsight – I began to put the two together.  Magicians deceive professionally, though I’m quick to add this is not in a malicious way.  Instead, they foster a sense of enjoyment, wonder and awe in their audiences who go to these shows deliberately for the experience of being misled.  Misdirection is to magicians what the Bible is to a preacher.  Once I had that particular eureka moment, my path was clear.

I was incredibly fortunate to do my undergraduate degree in a university where one of the few psychologists who research magic works.  It was a rocky road to getting funding, but I was able to create a proposal that would allow me to live the dream and begin my PhD in the Psychology of Magic.  Essentially, my thesis investigates how magicians learn to manipulate social attention to be successful at misdirection.  I began to discover that magic wasn’t just cool; it gives psychologists an amazing tool to tap into all sorts of aspects of cognition.  The body of research is growing and soon I will be contributing to it.

Katy Inglis is a first year PhD student at the University of Dundee.  She holds a First Class Honours degree in Psychology and has worked as research assistant and an assistant psychologist between graduating in 2010 and starting her PhD in 2011.  Her academic blog is Not Just Another PhD, and she tweets far too much at @katy_inglis. You can also find out more at The Secret Diary of a Twentysomething.  When she occasionally has a life outside her PhD, Katy trains in Taekwondo, learns German, makes things (including really good cakes) and watches *all the things* at the cinema.  You can view her professional blurb at the University of Dundee’s Psychology People page.