Weird Schedule

It seems that at about 9 p.m., my allergies stop bothering me and I finally start feeling alert, reasonably energetic, relatively headache-free, and fully brain-functional. Lately, this means I've been staying up until about 2 a.m. (oddly enough, usually working on my major area paper) and sleeping until about 10 a.m. This is sort of bothering me - it's totally out of line with my usual schedule and my current self-conception as more of a morning person - but there is not any real reason that it's a problem since there's no place for me to be at a particular time.

I feel like for minimum allergy suffering and maximum productivity this summer, I could arrange my schedule so I'm awake from about 7 p.m. until 11 a.m.

Or I could go see a freaking doctor about my allergies. (I say "a" doctor because I do not yet have any doctor in NC. I did not have an allergist in Austin, but I think I need to see one. My current regimen of drugs is not doing the trick, even without the rabbit fur / hay problem. The pollen in this state exists in crazy amounts.)

Incidentally, was I the only person who was really annoyed that Al Pacino's character in the movie Insomnia was a supposedly intelligent homicide detective but could not figure out how to darken his room in the 24-hour sun of the Alaska summer so that he could get some sleep? I mean, I get it that the man was haunted and deranged by guilt, so he had other issues affecting his sleep, but I find it frustrating when an adult is so completely incapable of handling such a basic life task.

You know, a basic life task like going to the doctor because your allergies are bad enough that you are contemplating becoming a nocturnal creature against habit and all sense. Argh.

Pesto

Today I harvested a bunch of basil from my thriving container herb garden and made enough pesto for two lasagnas. Then I decided to harvest oregano, too, and added it to the basil pesto, making a sort of mixed herb pesto (about 75% basil, 25% oregano). While there is probably some law in Italy about how pesto is to be made (no doubt using a mortar and pestle rather than a food processor, too), I believe it is still allowable in America to make pesto partly from oregano leaves. Some people may argue that it is allowable, but not advisable. Some people will not be eating the incredibly good lasagna I will be making with this pesto.

A Great Name

I think the current counterpart to Dave Barry's "that would be a great name for a band" thing is "that would be a great name for a blog."

I would like to nominate The Hidden Homunculus as a great name for a blog.

Source: MacCoon, D. G., Wallace, J. F., & Newman, J. P. (2004). Self-regulation: Context-appropriate balanced attention. The Handbook of Self-Regulation.

In this case, the hidden homunculus arises in the context of how attention is allocated. The authors argue, if "I" allocate attention, who is this "I"? A little person inside my head (i.e., a homunculus)? If I propose that "I" select my goal and my attention is allocated according to how various cues relate to my goal, this invokes a hidden homunculus.

The basic issue is that attributing something to a homunculus doesn't really answer the question because the same question can be asked of the homunculus itself. Does that homunculus have its own homunculus? Does the homunculus's homunculus have a homunculus of its own?

I guess you can think of this as being the intrapsychic version of "it's turtles all the way down."

And you know, The Homunculus's Homunculus is a pretty good blog name, too.

This Weekend in Ten Minutes

* Robert brought blackberries from the farmers market that were approximately 2" long and 1" in diameter and impossibly sweet. He also brought the Oatmeal Cookie of the Gods, containing golden raisins and coconut.

* I purchased new car insurance (at half the cost of my current policy) and renter's insurance.

* We went out early one morning with hopes of seeing the rabbit at the community garden, and just as I had given up, Robert spotted him outside the garden fence and only a few feet away from the safety of the bushes. He is indeed a big, healthy rabbit. He stood stock still while we watched him, and he kept his ears tilted 180 degrees backwards the better to monitor this potentially dangerous situation. I could have stood there all day but only looked for a very brief time so we didn't scare the poor guy to death. I love the way rabbits often have that reddish-brown fur on the napes of their necks.

* I guess I have reached some magical number with my investments because I got a very expensive direct mail piece welcoming me to the next level of service with the company.

* I am ready to find out what the hell is happening with the Big 12.

OK, back to work for me.

And Monkeys!: Space Training Edition

"In studies of monkeys trained for space flight, a series of training programs has been found to be very appealing to the primates and to result in general improvements in aggression, social relations, and hyperactivity (Rumbaugh & Washburn, 1995). We have now adapted these programs for use with toddlers and young children, and trials are under way to determine the range of improvement possible, and which children and which brain networks are likely to reflect those improvements."

M. R. Rueda, M. I. Posner, & M. K. Rothbart (2004). Attention control and self-regulation. Handbook of Self-Regulation.

I love that first phrase -- in studies of monkeys trained for space flight.

I was curious whether applying these monkey programs to human kids worked, and it appears that they did:

"Our exercises began by training the child to control the movement of a cat on a computer screen by using a joystick and to predict where an object would move on the screen, given its initial trajectory. Other exercises emphasized the use of working memory to retain information for a matching-to-sample task and the resolution of conflict.

We have tested the efficacy of a very brief five days of attention training with groups of 4- and 6-year-old children...The first and last days involved assessment of the effects of training by use of the ANT [an attention task], a general test of intelligence [K-BIT], and a temperament scale...

Five days is of course a minimal amount of training to influence the development of networks that develop over many years. Nonetheless, we found a general improvement in intelligence in the experimental group as measured by the K-BIT. This was due to improvement of the experimental group in performance on the nonverbal portion of the IQ test. Our analysis of the brain networks using EEG recording further suggested that the component most closely related to the anterior cingulate in prior adult studies changed significantly in the trained children to more closely resemble what is found in adults."

M. I. Posner & M. K. Rothbart (2006). Research on attention networks as a model for the integration of psychological science, Annual Review of Psychology.

You Think Herding Cats is Tough

In my sleep last night, Robert and I spent a long time in the guest bedroom of his grandmother's house trying to get an ever-increasing number of rabbits to go into and stay in a cage. The rabbits were all about 6 pounds, varied in color from cream to beige, and seemed to change gender randomly; the vast majority of them were named Kitty, which could have been confusing if any of them reacted in any way to their name, which they didn't. They were too busy eating papaya tablets that were scattered on the floor, running around in circles, and humping each other. At one point Robert left the bedroom door open and one rabbit escaped; he returned a few minutes later with three rabbits. Even when a rabbit was successfully lured/pushed into the cage, it escaped again almost immediately because the cage kept falling apart. This would have been more troublesome if the cage had been large enough for all the rabbits at any given time to fit. Even at the beginning of this doomed process, the cage could not have held as many as half of the rabbits, even if they had been crammed in, clowns-in-a-Volkswagen style.

It was basically a relief when Robert's intention to buy his grandmother's Christmas gift came up (it was Christmas Eve):

R: "I need to skip this dinner tonight and find a designer because I think my grandmother really wants a custom-designed Mork shirt for Christmas."

S: "Mork? You mean, like, from Ork?"

R: "Yeah."

S: "As in, na-nu na-nu Mork?"

The idea of Robert's grandmother in anything that could be described as a "custom-designed Mork shirt," which I pictured being worn with rainbow striped suspenders, was enough to wake me up from this madness.

Semester Closure

I finally went back to campus last week to pick up my graded papers and to meet with my advisor about what I'm doing over the summer.

I closed out my semester/first year with:

* An A on the developmental paper and an A/A- on the final exam

* An A- on the personality paper

* An A (actually, over 100) on the stats final exam

* Good feedback on my first year review

This summer, I am working on:

* Finalizing list of PhD programs/profs I'm applying to and collecting relevant info for that bitch of a process

* Writing my major area paper covering my first year project and setting the stage for the thesis (the outline/bio is due the first week of class with the final paper due Oct 1 but I want to get it finished this summer if I can); this will also form the basis of the journal submission I will write

* Coming up with how I want to extend the research for the thesis (I have some ideas)

Today I read the book Dissertations and Theses from Start to Finish: Psychology and Related Fields and was glad to discover:

* I already have a pretty reasonable grasp of what is going to happen when in terms of the process and the product

* However the book adds a lot of both general and specific advice that I believe will prove useful both for the major area paper and the thesis

I have a little under 3 months until classes start again. If all goes well in the future (i.e., I go to a PhD program), this will be the easiest, most relaxing summer I'll experience for a long time.