Ah yes, neuropsychology. Also known as "physics envy." if you get me started I'll rant at how this has totally subverted the discipline and probably held back brain work by ten years.
And the short form of the rant goes like this: back in the 80s psychologists did actual cognitive psych. How do people think? How does memory function? Etc. There are some serious problems with trying to match lab situations to the real world, but OK, work with that. There's all sorts of interesting cognitive results from that era, such as how people's mental maps distort things, order effects in recall, construction and leading effects (which is scary as hell if you think about its application to eyewitness testimony, but I digress).
Anyway, somewhere in there money got tight and someone noticed that the physicists never ran out of money and furthermore they had big shiny toys and they got treated like _real_ scientists with respect and all that. It's complicated, but it ties together stuff like academic prestige, who gets tenure, who gets appointments, and above all grant money. Psychologists discovered that if they wrote the right kinds of grants they could get BIG money to buy things like MRIs (or time on same) and big grants are always good. With grant money you can travel, get more grad students, publish more, and your department loves you.
So around the early 90s we stop seeing interesting advances in cognitive psychology and start seeing what I derisively call "mucking about in the hippocampus." Some bright spark discovers that SOMEHOW, the hippocampus is involved in memory formation and probably in retrieval. So gazillions of scientists start doing stuff like deliberately damaging the brains of baby chicks and seeing how this affects their ability to learn to peck (No, I'm not making this up - you can find _hundreds_ of published papers like this.)
Eventually they get around to humans and since it's frowned upon to actually cause brain damage in your subjects they do absurd shit like strapping people into giant magnets and showing them pictures of things while watching the pretty colored screens. Then they pretend that there's some relationship between what peoples' brains do while they're strapped immobile flat on their backs and what those brains do in normal life. FEH.
There's slowly starting to be a backlash in the form of sub-areas like "embodied cognition" and "cognition in the wild" but this is really fringe stuff because, guess what, it doesn't get big grant money. And it's hard, non-glamorous, non-shiney work. Learning how real people do actual important tasks like "navigate this supertanker through a narrow channel" or "share knowledge about a crowded airspace while controlling dozens of planes hurtling about at hundreds of miles per hour" happens. But it's happening at a snail's pace.
And for all the SHINEY gadgetry of neuroscience I can think of only two important results that have come out since it took over. That's a pretty piss-poor $/result ratio, imnvho.
Eventually they get around to humans and since it's frowned upon to actually cause brain damage in your subjects they do absurd shit like strapping people into giant magnets and showing them pictures of things while watching the pretty colored screens. Then they pretend that there's some relationship between what peoples' brains do while they're strapped immobile flat on their backs and what those brains do in normal life. FEH.
And don't forget sticking electrodes into the brains of people who are going in for brain surgery anyway, and asking them to remember word lists. The folks upstairs are doing this...
There's slowly starting to be a backlash in the form of sub-areas like "embodied cognition" and "cognition in the wild" but this is really fringe stuff because, guess what, it doesn't get big grant money. And it's hard, non-glamorous, non-shiney work. Learning how real people do actual important tasks like "navigate this supertanker through a narrow channel" or "share knowledge about a crowded airspace while controlling dozens of planes hurtling about at hundreds of miles per hour" happens. But it's happening at a snail's pace.
Hi, that'd be me. :) wispfox has actually just provided some lovely data (with brynndragon) on embodied cognition, and how people actually talk to each other in a work situation (although it was a bit of a lab situation, I tried to pick a realistic task), and now I'm writing the paper on how to design systems and infer cognitive load from that...
And don't forget sticking electrodes into the brains of people who are going in for brain surgery anyway, and asking them to remember word lists. The folks upstairs are doing this...
My reply to that one would be to laugh, since I don't remember word lists _NOW_.
If clinical psych no longer does the 'how minds work, biologically and environmentally', and neuros do stupid stuff with electodes, who _does_ investigate how people think? Because, on one hand, I want to help people figure themselves out (counseling), on the other hand, I also want to get more into trying to delve into people's thought processes. :)
Sounds like you do, although I thought that you were at least partly computer science-related.
Well, the stuff with electrodes isn't all stupid; it's just when they try to apply the small pieces they've learned to big puzzles, like why people are mean to other people, that it falls apart. It's fascinating work when it is used to draw conclusions on the small scale.
Word lists are a standard test for researching memory; they do things like give you a list of 50 words, then another list of 50 words, and see how many of the second you think were in the first list. There are many different ways to do this, and they all Mean Things we don't understand.
There are plenty of underfunded folks doing behaviorial psych, which I think is what you want. Except they look more at effects, rather than trying to figure out causes at the cellular level. More like, say, geologists than inorganic chemists, if that makes any sense.
What I'm doing is really Computer Science, but has strayed into the stuff that drwex mentioned (the Hutchins book he mentions is a central citation in all of my papers), and is what my advisor calls "Cognitive Science". Hutchins' book is a nice accessible treatment of the view that "thinking" is partly you and partly what's around you. If you're not too rigorous with your definitions it quickly starts to sound very new-agey-we're-all-connected, but it's just the idea that people use the world around them, and other people, to help them think -- the way a desktop calendar helps you organize your schedule is a good idea, or the way you might use a checklist to make sure you do every step in a complicated task (like a recipe). Likewise you use the people around you the same way -- which things like this comment (http://www.livejournal.com/users/wispfox/581395.html?thread=3744275#t3744275) reveal explicitly.
It's not earth-shattering stuff, but if you say to a psychologist, "Hey, did you know your notepad is doing some of your thinking for you?" they lock you up, or stop reading your academic paper, so it's taken some time to be generally accepted. And of course you don't discover how people use outside tools by sticking electrodes in their brains, unless they're using the tools while you're doing it. So you only learn about "solo" cognition, which while we do it, isn't as common nor as complex...
I'd say you should look into cognitive psychology (as long as you stay away from neural network theories), educational psychology, anthropology, and usability.
Cognitive psych, from your description, is pretty much what interests me, yes. And much of psych makes me wary, because so many people are obsessed with Freud. So too much of cognitive psych gets all mixed up with Freud's ideas about one's relationship with one's parents, which mixes poorly with neurologic problems, or other kinds of environmental problems.
I kinda had the sense that neuropsych _did_ this kind of stuff, without being as likely to be distracted by Frued, and not necessarily needing to fiddle around with the biology part of things constantly. Because, really, this is what fascinates me. How people think, and why they think they way they do. Both in terms of physical brain and neuro characteristics _and_ in terms of environment.
It has been my experience that, while Freudians aren't quite as rare as behaviorists, there really aren't many Freudians around these days. There are certainly a number of terms and concepts in the discipline that more or less originated with Freud and his students. But then again, the term "atom" has been around since the Greeks and we don't really think it refers to the same things anymore. Similarly, one may use Freudian interpretation as a style, particularly in therapeutic settings. But that's not really a field of research in the way that I'm talking about cognitive psychology.
So, for example, when researching decision-making processes (another area of fascination for me) a psychologist might make reference to someone's "ego" getting involved, while not at all subscribing to notions of id/ego/superego.
What neuropsych does is study _brain_ processes, particularly at the electrochemical level (though there has been a smidgen of work at the quantum physics level, which might prove interesting if it pans out). Then there is this massive leaping handwave and on the other side the neuropsychologist purports to be able to tell you something about the human cognitive process. Analogously one might observe the flow of electrons on a PC's circuit board and based on that make pronouncements about the World Wide Web.
Modern neuropsych is completely incapable of dealing with environmental problems in part because their equipment doesn't work in the natural environment and in part because they have no model of what they're studying, based on which they could point to a difference and say "see, that's an environmental effect." And, if you really like the notion of embodied cognition then you can stand back and say that neuropsych will _never_ be able to say anything about this stuff because all the interesting stuff happens _outside_ of the cranium.
I'm biased, in part because he's a professional colleague and some of his early papers inspired part of my PhD, but I still recommend that if you're interested in this stuff, you read Ed Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild. It's almost 10 years old now, so somewhat dated but he pretty strongly argues the case that cognition does not happen inside the head, in much the way that Wittgenstein argued that there can't be a private language.
I think (I'm not sure) that epi_lj's sister just got her MD/PhD (specialized program) in clinical neuropsychology. (http://web4.uwindsor.ca/units/psychology/clinical.nsf/0/170a1f2a9a59909d85256de5006e67b3?OpenDocument).
Sounds like I ought to be able to take the time to figure out what I want to specialize in while I'm in school, since it's a bunch of independant study-type things which do that for the Psy.D. So I have some time.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 05:15 pm (UTC)And, I do kinda want to hear your rant!
no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 06:14 pm (UTC)And the short form of the rant goes like this: back in the 80s psychologists did actual cognitive psych. How do people think? How does memory function? Etc. There are some serious problems with trying to match lab situations to the real world, but OK, work with that. There's all sorts of interesting cognitive results from that era, such as how people's mental maps distort things, order effects in recall, construction and leading effects (which is scary as hell if you think about its application to eyewitness testimony, but I digress).
Anyway, somewhere in there money got tight and someone noticed that the physicists never ran out of money and furthermore they had big shiny toys and they got treated like _real_ scientists with respect and all that. It's complicated, but it ties together stuff like academic prestige, who gets tenure, who gets appointments, and above all grant money. Psychologists discovered that if they wrote the right kinds of grants they could get BIG money to buy things like MRIs (or time on same) and big grants are always good. With grant money you can travel, get more grad students, publish more, and your department loves you.
So around the early 90s we stop seeing interesting advances in cognitive psychology and start seeing what I derisively call "mucking about in the hippocampus." Some bright spark discovers that SOMEHOW, the hippocampus is involved in memory formation and probably in retrieval. So gazillions of scientists start doing stuff like deliberately damaging the brains of baby chicks and seeing how this affects their ability to learn to peck (No, I'm not making this up - you can find _hundreds_ of published papers like this.)
Eventually they get around to humans and since it's frowned upon to actually cause brain damage in your subjects they do absurd shit like strapping people into giant magnets and showing them pictures of things while watching the pretty colored screens. Then they pretend that there's some relationship between what peoples' brains do while they're strapped immobile flat on their backs and what those brains do in normal life. FEH.
There's slowly starting to be a backlash in the form of sub-areas like "embodied cognition" and "cognition in the wild" but this is really fringe stuff because, guess what, it doesn't get big grant money. And it's hard, non-glamorous, non-shiney work. Learning how real people do actual important tasks like "navigate this supertanker through a narrow channel" or "share knowledge about a crowded airspace while controlling dozens of planes hurtling about at hundreds of miles per hour" happens. But it's happening at a snail's pace.
And for all the SHINEY gadgetry of neuroscience I can think of only two important results that have come out since it took over. That's a pretty piss-poor $/result ratio, imnvho.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 06:34 pm (UTC)And don't forget sticking electrodes into the brains of people who are going in for brain surgery anyway, and asking them to remember word lists. The folks upstairs are doing this...
There's slowly starting to be a backlash in the form of sub-areas like "embodied cognition" and "cognition in the wild" but this is really fringe stuff because, guess what, it doesn't get big grant money. And it's hard, non-glamorous, non-shiney work. Learning how real people do actual important tasks like "navigate this supertanker through a narrow channel" or "share knowledge about a crowded airspace while controlling dozens of planes hurtling about at hundreds of miles per hour" happens. But it's happening at a snail's pace.
Hi, that'd be me. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 06:55 pm (UTC)My reply to that one would be to laugh, since I don't remember word lists _NOW_.
If clinical psych no longer does the 'how minds work, biologically and environmentally', and neuros do stupid stuff with electodes, who _does_ investigate how people think? Because, on one hand, I want to help people figure themselves out (counseling), on the other hand, I also want to get more into trying to delve into people's thought processes. :)
Sounds like you do, although I thought that you were at least partly computer science-related.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 01:22 am (UTC)Word lists are a standard test for researching memory; they do things like give you a list of 50 words, then another list of 50 words, and see how many of the second you think were in the first list. There are many different ways to do this, and they all Mean Things we don't understand.
There are plenty of underfunded folks doing behaviorial psych, which I think is what you want. Except they look more at effects, rather than trying to figure out causes at the cellular level. More like, say, geologists than inorganic chemists, if that makes any sense.
What I'm doing is really Computer Science, but has strayed into the stuff that drwex mentioned (the Hutchins book he mentions is a central citation in all of my papers), and is what my advisor calls "Cognitive Science". Hutchins' book is a nice accessible treatment of the view that "thinking" is partly you and partly what's around you. If you're not too rigorous with your definitions it quickly starts to sound very new-agey-we're-all-connected, but it's just the idea that people use the world around them, and other people, to help them think -- the way a desktop calendar helps you organize your schedule is a good idea, or the way you might use a checklist to make sure you do every step in a complicated task (like a recipe). Likewise you use the people around you the same way -- which things like this comment (http://www.livejournal.com/users/wispfox/581395.html?thread=3744275#t3744275) reveal explicitly.
It's not earth-shattering stuff, but if you say to a psychologist, "Hey, did you know your notepad is doing some of your thinking for you?" they lock you up, or stop reading your academic paper, so it's taken some time to be generally accepted. And of course you don't discover how people use outside tools by sticking electrodes in their brains, unless they're using the tools while you're doing it. So you only learn about "solo" cognition, which while we do it, isn't as common nor as complex...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 06:50 pm (UTC)I kinda had the sense that neuropsych _did_ this kind of stuff, without being as likely to be distracted by Frued, and not necessarily needing to fiddle around with the biology part of things constantly. Because, really, this is what fascinates me. How people think, and why they think they way they do. Both in terms of physical brain and neuro characteristics _and_ in terms of environment.
Thoughts?
no subject
Date: 2005-09-20 07:28 pm (UTC)So, for example, when researching decision-making processes (another area of fascination for me) a psychologist might make reference to someone's "ego" getting involved, while not at all subscribing to notions of id/ego/superego.
What neuropsych does is study _brain_ processes, particularly at the electrochemical level (though there has been a smidgen of work at the quantum physics level, which might prove interesting if it pans out). Then there is this massive leaping handwave and on the other side the neuropsychologist purports to be able to tell you something about the human cognitive process. Analogously one might observe the flow of electrons on a PC's circuit board and based on that make pronouncements about the World Wide Web.
Modern neuropsych is completely incapable of dealing with environmental problems in part because their equipment doesn't work in the natural environment and in part because they have no model of what they're studying, based on which they could point to a difference and say "see, that's an environmental effect." And, if you really like the notion of embodied cognition then you can stand back and say that neuropsych will _never_ be able to say anything about this stuff because all the interesting stuff happens _outside_ of the cranium.
I'm biased, in part because he's a professional colleague and some of his early papers inspired part of my PhD, but I still recommend that if you're interested in this stuff, you read Ed Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild. It's almost 10 years old now, so somewhat dated but he pretty strongly argues the case that cognition does not happen inside the head, in much the way that Wittgenstein argued that there can't be a private language.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 02:30 pm (UTC)Sounds like I ought to be able to take the time to figure out what I want to specialize in while I'm in school, since it's a bunch of independant study-type things which do that for the Psy.D. So I have some time.