Book/Life Congruence

Friday is my "light" day, on which I don't have any classes of my own to go to; I try to get a jump start on the crushing work for the next week, though, and this is easier when I get to school early and stay later, even though my only commitments are from 11-1. I have a pretty good handle at this point on what work I am more efficient with / find it easier to make myself to do when I'm at school and what kind of work I do well with from home.

I got to my office by about 8:30 and worked solidly until 11:00 on re-reading and takes notes on my computer from my neuro book, catching up to the chapter we just did this week! This was great, beyond my expectations and goals for the day, and I planned to do the readings for next week's neuro class when I got back at 1:00.

Today's undergrad research methods lecture was not particularly boring, but since I had (for the first time in a little while) an unsatisfactory quality of sleep last night, and I was suffering a bit from a low-pressure-system headache, I had the worst time just trying to stay awake. (Thankfully I sit in the very back row and thus do not set a bad example.) After class, I went back to my office to do the reading.

Still feeling almost overwhelmingly sleepy, I opened the book to the chapter, topic: attention, and tried really hard to focus on the material but not as successfully as I would have liked. I had to read the section on the reticular activating system and its role in arousal and alertness a couple of times since I kept half-dozing off while my eyes went through the motions of reading. The irony of the situation was not, however, lost on me. Eventually, I did become slightly more alert and I decided that it was an appropriate time to bust out one of the 45-calorie mini-packs of raisins I carry around for emergency situations (as Sun-Maid tells us, they're good for "quick energy," whereby energy = calories from sugar). Whether the infusion of sugar helped or it just had a placebo effect, I can't say, but I did manage to work my way through the material with a reasonable level of attention.

Then I came home and took a delicious, rather long nap, though I screwed up my eating schedule a bit and woke up with a stomach ache that didn't go away for some time after eating dinner.

Anyway, the odd congruence between my reading material and the immediate conditions of my life this afternoon reminds me of a story I don't think I've told on this blog:

Last year some time, during that period when I was going to the college library every morning and reading through books on psychology / economics / etc., I was in the library reading when I heard a girl scream from somewhere in the stacks behind me. The approximately 8 of us seated at tables in the immediate vicinity all looked up with surprise and then looked at each other with confusion. About 15 seconds later I'm guessing (though it felt like minutes), the girl came out from the stacks laughing really hard into her cell phone, and everyone realized, "OK, she was shrieking with laughter" and went back to their work.

At this point, I resumed my reading of what must be, at this point in my life, my dozenth description of the bystander effect, which refers to the tendency for people to be less likely to offer help in an emergency when there are other people present, and felt sort of dismayed that even being not only knowledgeable about this phenomenon but having this knowledge as the most salient thing in my brain at the time of this girl screaming, I still reacted this useless way. And I could definitely feel that it was not a diffusion of responsibility issue (I did not just assume that somebody else would help) but that I wasn't sure what the situation really was and so fell into the trap of social proof (since nobody else was doing anything, action mustn't be warranted). Ugh.