I would have to believe that writing a senior thesis on a typewriter made it SO MUCH easier to gauge and literally feel your progress!

Image taken from here.

So tomorrow will be one of the busiest–but most exciting days–in recent memory:

• 9am-12pm: scanning my first subs for my study! >>fingers crossed<<
• 3-7pm: ushering at the Lewis Library Dedication (oh snap, Gehry will be there!)
• 8-9pm: Caritá is playing at the talent show in the Forbes–come check it out! =)

Getting up 1-2 hours earlier instead of going to bed 1-2 hours later miraculously helps with productivity and soundess of mind. That is all.

in this post, i’d like to give you a sampling of my summer reading list. this summer, i want to further delve into current trends in experimental psychology/neuroscience and consider how many psychologists (e.g. Jonathan Haidt, Gary Marcus) have brought psychological research to bear on greater issues surrounding the human condition. 

Descartes’ Error has become a classic and a must-read for anyone interested in the cognitive processes by which we come to make sense of our world and interact with it. Damasio’s keen emphasis on the emotional faculties and the unique role they play in “rational” thinking is an indispensable assumption in current psychology circles, especially in judgment and decision-making. 

In Kluge – The Haphazard  Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Marcus posits that the mind has been subjected to the sometimes helpful but ever careless tinkering of evolutionary processes, giving rise to a mental life that is not always adaptive in the long term. I suspend my final judgment of Marcus’ premise until I read the book, but the NYTimes review does raise some important points about taking the metaphor of a “kluge” with a grain of salt.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, makes a startling claim based on his research on “moral dumbfounding”–when people intuitively perceive something as morally wrong but cannot explain why. This phenomenon “led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong” (taken from this article). I am actually most excited about digging into this one. When I do I’ll post my feedback. 

being type-A until friday at 4:30…then FREEDOM!

i am deeply, deeply in love with Papers, a library-based program for mac users that stores all scientific papers in one place, while at the same time including database plugins (e.g. pubmed, google scholar) that allow you to search and download .pdfs in one fell swoop. if you have a mac, and if you have found it burdensome to keep track of all the .pdfs you download for your research, GET PAPERS! there is a 30-day trial period without any obligation to buy. assuming my relationship with Papers doesn’t hit any snags in the remaining 27 days of my trial period, i am going to invest the $40 to buy the program–in turn supporting the great work of Alex Griekspoor & Tom Groothuis, the two scientist-programmers who are the masterminds behind Papers.

image taken from mekentosj.com