New & Improved Mental Schema

Tonight I have been re-reading some articles for my research (that I initially read up to 18 months ago) because I am trying to both (1) finish the manuscript based on my first year project, and (2) work on the literature review for my thesis, which covers similar topics but in a different way (as well as entirely new topics).  My plan at the beginning of the week had been to complete (1), then proceed to (2), but I'm finding that difficult to do because my advisor would like me to include a brief head's-up about my thesis idea in the manuscript's "future research" section.  That means I need to develop a short, straightforward, and clear paragraph about the purpose of my thesis and the evidence from existing literature that supports my hypotheses. 

Even though I've done my thesis proposal, my proposal wasn't all that great in terms of telling a compelling story, based on previous theory and research, that makes my hypotheses seem intuitively obvious.  This is because in reality, the hypotheses are kind of crazy, convoluted, and not obvious at all, and I had not (and still have not) done the thorough reading, thinking, and writing necessary to either justify them or make them easy to understand.  (When developing this thesis project with my advisor, I did not realize at first just how many new literatures I would need to read up on or how much I would need to reframe and/or refocus the literatures I had already discussed in my first year paper.  In other words: Damn, this is a lot more work than I expected!  Let's just hope that the hypotheses are supported so I won't have to dig around to find other theories etc. that my results are consistent with instead.  Hey, I'm in psychology - you don't like this theory, I've got others.)

So I'm finding myself both reading new articles and going back to familiar articles.  I've really surprised myself this evening with how differently I am thinking about these articles the second time (or the third or fourth or whatever for some of them).  I'm surprised even though I know that my schema (organizing knowledge structure or mental framework for understanding things) for this stuff must be much more complex and awesome now than it was when I first started my program. 

In this respect, I feel a bit like a nutritionist in one of those calorie-estimation studies who's all like, "Yeah, everybody drastically underestimates the calorie content of large servings" and guesses that the chocolate cake has 800 calories only to find out that it has 1200.  "What?!  Get out of town!"

Anyway, it's good that it's getting easier to understand this stuff because I have a lot to understand, synthesize, and then (the great challenge) write about in a way that people (other psychologists) can make sense of without reading it five times and without wanting to bash their heads against a brick wall.