One nagging thing I still don't understand about myself

The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest was launched in 2003, as a fortnightly e-mail service. It is read and appreciated by many thousands of psychologists and others across the world.

To mark the 150th e-mail edition, its editor, Dr Christian Jarrett, asked some of the world’s leading psychologists to describe in 150 words ‘one nagging thing you still don’t understand about yourself’. Their answers featured on the blog, The Independent newspaper and websites internationally.

My own consciousness - Dr Sue Blackmore, freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth

I believe (although I’ve never seen it for myself) that inside my skull is a brain containing billions of neurons connected to each other in trillions of ways, with signals zooming about, setting off other signals, and generally creating massively complicated loops, coalitions, sustained patterns, and multiple parallel organised streams of information that combined together control the behaviour of this – my body.

And that’s it. So how come I feel as though there is a conscious “me” as well? The oh-so-tempting idea that I am something else – a soul, a spirit, a mystical entity – is rubbish, although I once believed in it. This question nags at me so much that I have devoted most of my life to it – through research, writing, and thirty years of daily meditation.

But I still don’t understand. And the more I look, the less substantial my own self seems to be. What is consciousness? And who is conscious? I really don’t know.

Why do I take on too much? - Dr Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University

Over the stretch of my professional years, I’d say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking – or even golden opportunity – should be firmly rejected. Whenever I’ve allowed one-too-many responsibilities onto my plate, everything – including the new item – has suffered from overcrowding.

With that threshold crossed, I’ve no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work. If I had a single piece of advice for young researchers, it would be to create and follow a rule for avoiding this state of affairs.

The rule could involve something objective (e.g., never exceeding a specific quota of research involvements) or subjective (e.g., avoiding the feeling of rushing to, from, and through all of one’s commitments). The key is to apply the rule ruthlessly. Anything less would be another form of error.

Dark places - Sue Gardner, BPS President

I can’t believe I accepted this assignment. Surely any admission undermines my credibility as a psychologist? Or does failure to reveal something denote arrogance, lack of insight or self-consciousness with the same implications for reputation and self-esteem?

I’m cautious about excessive introspection without some trusted person to offer perspective and balance. I have a dark place inside which at various stages of my life has been occupied by ghosts, Daleks and negative emotions. Somehow I need this place though, to connect me to others especially those who want support with change and containment.

In working with people who have mental health needs and substance misuse I use their desire to escape their own dark place to form a connection which, together with the research evidence, best practice guidelines and clinical tools, can accelerate their journey to recovery. Perhaps if I understood myself fully my own journey would be over.

Methodological flaws - Jerome Kagan, Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

I remain puzzled over what appears to be a compulsion, that I cannot tame, to publish papers and books that summarize the empirical evidence pointing to serious problems with popular procedures and assumptions that permeate many domains in psychology.

These include: (1) the use of decontextualized predicates for emotional, personality, and cognitive concepts that fail to specify the agent, the local context, and source of evidence; (2) the reliance on single sources of evidence for broad constructs; and (3) the sole reliance on self-report data without supporting behavioural observations.

This writing seems to have little effect on the practices of the relevant investigators, yet I persist. It is not because I am arrogant. I celebrate humility and my close friends support that self-diagnosis. Any help with this symptom will be appreciated.

Sporting rituals - David Lavallee, Professor of Psychology and Head of Department of Sport and Exercise Science at Aberystwyth University in Wales. 

I wish I knew why I sometimes engage in superstitious behaviours while playing golf. When I play I am interested in psychological phenomena such as self-handicapping, the attributions people make on the course and how a round can deteriorate after a bad shot or hole (I note the latter from considerable personal experience!).

I also try to apply psychological techniques such as imagery to improve my score although I tend to do this more at crucial times, such as before a pressure drive. While I appreciate that carrying the same amount of tees in my pocket during a round will not help me play better, or the action of always marking my golf ball on the green with a coin placed “heads-up” will not influence the outcome (making the putt), I will probably continue to resort to such behaviours as if I was one of Skinner’s pigeons.

Learning difficulties - Mike Posner, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Professor at the Weill Medical College in New York (Sackler Institute). 

Why have I had such a hard time learning to change a light bulb, fix a car and cook dinner, while for others it seems such a breeze? Generally I did pretty well in school but ran into deep problems with analytic geometry, inorganic chemistry and differential equations. Others do it, why not me? I am well aware that many will say just try harder, but I think it must be something other than that.

After more than 50 years of psychology, I think I am just beginning to understand. We are learning about neural networks underlying skills and how they are shaped by genetic variation and early experience. New skills often reshape old networks: my problems in sequential movement in handwriting might make other multistep tasks difficult to learn. My learning handicaps are still a mystery but now I know where to look.

The explanatory gap - Steven Rose, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Open University where he was previously Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group. 

If only there were just one! A lifetime studying the neurobiology of learning and memory, and I still wonder about St Augustine’s questions 1600 years ago: “How does my brain/mind encompass vast regions of space and time, abstract thoughts and numbers, false propositions” – or for that matter the memory of my fourth birthday party or what I had for breakfast yesterday. Meantime, I am embarrassed by the naivete of my fellow neuroscientists who mechanically collapse mind into brain, or claim to be able to localise within that mass of tissue: equity, empathy, romantic love… “You’re nothing but a bunch of neurons” claimed Francis Crick, locating consciousness in the anterior cingulate gyrus. Lombroso redux indeed! As the mind is wider than the brain, to misquote Emily Dickinson, what other sciences/knowledge do we need to bring to bear to understand ourselves?

Self-control - Martin Seligman, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some theorists, like my friend Roy Baumeister, believe that self-control is a general trait. My experience with weight loss versus exercise belies this. I have weighed 95 kg for the last twenty years, and I have dieted a dozen times only to return to 95 kg each time, usually after losing about 5 kg.

No self-control? Hardly. Eighteen months ago I took up walking, knowing that 10,000 steps per day halves cardiac risk for someone my age and with my profile of risk. I have walked an average of 14,000 steps per day ever since and my New Year’s resolution is 5,000,000 steps in 2009. I am well on track to my goal. So self-control is for me highly domain-specific. For you?

Career masochism - Robert Sternberg, Dean of Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Professor of Education, and Director of the PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise) Center.

In psychology, you are rewarded (1) partly for the research you do, and (2) partly for (a) the topic on which you do the research and (b) the methods you use. The first point (1) is what you learn explicitly about throughout graduate school. The second point (2) you generally have to figure out for yourself as tacit knowledge. For example, suppose you want a good academic job. Then, with regard to (2), you should study something like (a) perception, attention, or memory using (b) fMRI methodology.

You can be in lower (worse) percentiles of your cohort and you will still land a nice job. Suppose, though, that you study (a) intelligence, creativity, or wisdom using (b) individual-difference methodology. Good luck! So what I don’t understand is why I always choose both the less rewarded topics (2a) and methodologies (2b)! Am I a masochist or what?

Wit - Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. 

I have no idea why I occasionally think funny things. For example, the other day I was watching the film “District 9“, which is about an alien race known as “prawns”, and thought “I wonder if the alien in charge is called a king prawn?”.

I would be the first to admit that it was not the world’s greatest joke, but still, where did that moderately amusing idea come from? And why are some people so skilled at creating funny stuff, whilst others wouldn’t recognise a proverbial custard pie, even if it hit them in the face?

My guess is that the creation of comedy will remain a mystery for centuries, although at some point in the not-too-distant future, I suspect someone will carry out functional MRI scans of comedians creating jokes, and claim to have identified the part of the brain responsible for producing humour. Now, that will be funny.

Time management - Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania where he also acts as co-director of the school’s Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.

I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new foods and two new body products) after using it for a week.

We predicted that the parents of our college undergraduates would be better than their children at predicting their hedonic trajectory, but 25 more years of self-experience did nothing for them. Nor for me. Every night, I bring home a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning.

I have been doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.

Nature, nurture - Robert Plomin is MRC Research Professor in Behavioural Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, where he is deputy director of the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre.

After forty years of doing research on nature and nurture in psychology, there are two crucial (not just nagging) things I want to understand. One is about nature and one is about nurture.

About nature: Behavioural genetic research has shown that genetics is important throughout psychology. I want to find these genes in order to use them to explore the nature-nurture interface in psychology. During the past decade, methods have become available that can identify specific genes but it has proven extremely difficult to find these genes; the most likely reason is that many genes are involved and each gene has a very small effect.

About nurture: Behavioural genetic research has shown that environmental influences in psychology generally make children growing up in the same family different, called a non-shared environment. I want to know why children growing up in the same family are so different but this has also proven difficult.

Puzzling love for our children - Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley

I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go. We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill-defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours.

Satiators and addicts - Stephen Kosslyn, Dean of Social Science and Professor of Psychology at Harvard

I’ve been told that there are two kinds of people in the world: Satiators and Addicts. Satiators get their fill of something, and that’s enough for the rest of their lives. For example, I’m that way about beaches: I grew up a 10-minute walk from the Pacific Ocean, and went to the beach practically every day during my adolescence. But enough was enough, and I now don’t care whether I ever see a beach again. In contrast, Addicts get hooked, and never get enough of something. I’ve obsessed about the same narrow research topic for over 35 years, and the end is not in sight. Why am I a Satiator in some cases, and an Addict in others?

Who am I? - Steve Reicher is Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews

Who am I? I am a jew, but I am no believer and I do not believe that Israel speaks for me. I can’t be sure what it means to be a jew. Yet I am sure that others are sure. And I know that jewishness matters. I know that millions were slaughtered for being jewish. I know that millions have been displaced by jews for not being jewish. What is being jewish to my world and to me? Who are we? Who am I? I was born in England of family who fled from Germany and Poland. I was raised in England by parents who moved abroad for work. I live in Scotland with a wife born in Yorkshire of a father born in Pakistan and with a son born in Scotland. Our history is pandemonium, our destiny (we hope) is Caledonian. Who do we want to be? What will others let us be? And does it count one jot to anyone but me? No wonder I study identity.

Still fooled - Norbert Schwarz, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad – unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorising until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

Optimism - Ellen Langer, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

When my dear friend and colleague Roger Brown was alive he used to say that to him, I define the edge of the optimism continuum. I think my outlook explains my choice of research topics. Instead of describing what is, most of my work is aimed at exploring what might be. In my most recent book I discuss extending what we take as limits to our physical health and well-being. I don’t understand why I’m so confident that we’ve just scratched the surface of what our consciousness is capable of, but every year and every experiment I do makes me more certain that the future will only vaguely resemble the past in this regard. I don’t know how I came to these views, or whether in the long run people like me will ‘win or lose’ to the cynics. One thing I do know, however, is while the future unfolds people like me are having a better time as we consider all sorts of possibility. So, I remain optimistic about being optimistic.

Death and forgiveness - Paul Ekman, Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG)

In my recent conversations with the Dalai Lama we disagreed about two matters. One was fear of death, which I claim not to feel and he claims everyone has. The evidence is in his favour since all religions promise life of some kind after death, and they would not do so if people didn’t need it. I fear a painful death, but not death itself. Can’t comprehend why people do; which doesn’t mean I don’t wish to continue living, but as time progresses and body parts and the mind wears out I expect death will be welcome. Our other disagreement was about forgiveness. I believe there are unforgiveable actions – child abuse, rape, holocausts, torture are examples. The Dalai Lama says he forgives but does not forget. In my view, since he believes such people will be reincarnated in an undesirable form, he doesn’t need to forgive them.

Nightmares - Elizabeth Loftus, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine

I don’t understand why I have nightmares almost every night. Nightmares of frustration. Obstacles in my way that keep me from catching an airplane trip on time. Obstacles that keep me from getting where I’m supposed to be. I wake up almost every morning with a sense of relief – ‘Thank goodness it was just a dream.’ None of my colleagues seem to spend their nights this way. What possible reason is there for this mental behaviour, night after night, that is clearly so uncomfortable? One colleague, a developmental psychologist, said: ‘That’s it – the happy relief you feel at the end. There’s your reinforcement.’ And thus she took away my one idea, by explaining it. It is now one nagging thing that I only partly understand. Or do I?

Lost opportunities - Marilyn Davidson, Professor of Work Psychology at Manchester Business School

Why didn’t I ask my grandparents before they died, more about their childhoods? ‘Grandpa, what was it like being born in 1900 into a world where man couldn’t fly and an abacus was the closest thing to a computer?’ ‘Grandpa, did it hurt when grandma burnt the leeches off your back on your return from the trenches, as you sat in the tin bath in front of the fire?’ ‘Nana, did you enjoy being one of the first families in Sunderland to own an “automobile” and having to eat “below stairs” with the cooks and the maids?’ ‘Nana, how did you cope as the youngest of 12 in a poor, Derbyshire, farming family, gaining a scholarship to grammar school, but being forced to go away into service at 13 to become a scullery maid?’

What should I do? - Paul Broks, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Plymouth

There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived at any great insight or understanding. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of brain, mind and selfhood that first drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift – let’s imagine a neural switch somewhere in the frontolimbic circuitry – from one preoccupying question, What am I?, to another, What should I do? It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding than to consider the value of things, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star?

Overcoming irrationality - David Buss, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas

Why do I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases? One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required.  One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.

Beauty - Chris McManus Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at UCL

What is this thing I call beauty? Not ‘art’ as a social phenomenon based on status or display, or beautiful faces seen merely as biological fitness markers. Rather, the sheer, drawing-in-of-breath beauty of a Handel aria, a Rothko painting, T.S. Eliot’s poems, or those everyday moments of sun shining through wet autumn leaves, or even a PowerPoint layout seeming just right. Content itself doesn’t matter – Cézanne’s paintings of apples are not beautiful because one likes apples, and there are beautiful photographs of horrible things. Somewhere there must be something formal, structural, compositional, involving the arrangement of light and shade, of sounds, of words best ordered to say old ideas in new ways. When I see beauty, I know it; and others must also see it, or they wouldn’t make the paintings I like or have them hung in galleries. But why then doesn’t everyone see it in the same way?