Friday 6 April 2001

Pic of the day: April issue of ...

Psychology Today

Recently got my hands on the April issue of Psychology Today. I use to buy every issue, because there is not a lot of competition and I do have an interest in psychology. This does not mean that I consider PT an ideal source of information. I shall now briefly comment on this.

The most obvious impression is that a magazine that regularly needs to use attractive females on their cover (sometimes scantily clad too) probably doesn't have too much selling points in their content. Actually, after recent change in command, the provocative females seems to be replaced with famous ones. Perhaps this is a sign of improvement.

The magazine has expanded the part dedicated to herbal therapy, much of which is poorly documented and bears a striking resemblance to the content of some of their major advertisers. On the up side, this part of the magazine is now more properly segregated from the rest of the content. On the down side, it seems to grow. I feel that this part of the magazine falls outside what I would think of as psychology in any conventional sense.

Uncritical report of popular science, to the point where "popular" totally eclipses "science". For instance, in this issue they refer to a study that "shows that men who have three or more orgasms a week are 50% less likely to die from coronary heart disease". This particular instance of tabloid science is particularly common here in Scandinavia, and I guess I should write a separate page so I can just point to it whenever I come across this particular stupidity. To keep it simple, when a man has chest pains walking up a small flight of stairs and gets winded walking to the garage, do you think he is likely to have an active and intense sex life? Ex-squeeze me baby.

In real science, we would have taken two groups of equally healthy, equally wealthy men and randomly selected half of them to not have orgasms and the other half to have as many as they physically could, then check their health every half year until one group showed significantly better health than the other. So far, all anybody ever has done anywhere is to tell us that healthy people have more sex, so sex must be healthy. What if health is sexy? Ever thought of that? No, because the collective intelligence over at PT is evidently less than I possess alone on my spare time. That is kind of frightening, once you think about it.

(Oh, by the way, I feel much better now. Thanks for asking. ;)

***

Despite the obvious weaknesses, I find that PT does give lots of new impulses to a layman. Remember, I am not a psychologist by trade. My brother is, but we don't get together much; and besides, he sort of specializes. Thanks to PT, I can easily keep updated on some of the big trends in pop psychology.

Recently for instance there has been a big backlash against "recovered memories", after Professor Loftus and others have found that most people are unable to differentiate between genuine and fabricated memories. I guess this backlash may also hurt some who have genuine memories of childhood abuse, and who have chosen to see a therapist first and police later instead of the other way around. But something had to be done: The same techniques that were used to recall repressed memories of childhood abuse also worked nicely to recall memories of alien abductions and various injustices in earlier lives. The lawsuit from these would be the downfall of the legal system as we know it. (In America alone, 4 million people remember to have been abducted by aliens. This is nearly the entire population of Norway.)

The debate about false memories is a sore and heartbreaking affair. But the side effect is that people become aware of how malleable our memories are. What we remember is not necessarily what happened. It is not just that we don't remember everything; that can be bad enough, if we forget very selectively. But we also remember things that did not happen. If there ever was a good reason to keep a daily diary, I think this would be it.

***

How would you react if someone told you that you need to study 40 hours more each week, when you're already a full time student? This, according to the lates Psychology Today, is what you need to increase your GPA by just one letter grade. Each additional hour per week resulted in only a 0.025 increase in GPA, says Carl Zulauf, Ph.D. Incidentally, I notice that he is a professor of ... agricultural marketing. But hey, that's one more professorate than I'll ever have.

Am I jumping to conclusions here, or would the natural first reaction to this be that grades are born, not made? Because, frankly, I don't see anyone suddenly studying 8 hours more each day. But again, we are facing a "study" without a control group. This should raise the hackles of any scientist. What if our professor simply discovered that the highly intelligent students cut down on studying and spent more time doing social things? While the less gifted students already spent a lot of time studying, in order to stay afloat at all. The net result would be that students would get approximately the same grades, regardless of how much they studied. And it would be all too easy to conclude that doing your homework doesn't matter: You get the same grades anyway. But that would be dead wrong.

I find myself thinking: What a strange experience it must be to be a normal, reading a magazine like this without asking critical questions in my mind, just lapping it up. Scary, huh?

***

As I sometimes say, all knowledge is one to me. Not one as in a point, but one as in a whole, a continuity. It is like I am inside a giant dome, and projected on the walls of it are all the sciences known to man. And there are no boundaries, only arbitrary changes of name. Any science changes subtly into another, or usually more than one. Astronomy morphs into cosmology as the scales grow, but cosmology turns into subnuclear physics as you move sufficiently far back in time. In a similar way, medicine is like the borderland between biochemistry and psychology. And so on and so forth.

This is of course just a metaphor. The point is that all things are connected ... not just by bridges, but rather flowing into each other. I don't know if I think this way because I am a mystic, because I am a genius, or because I am an adult. I know it wasn't always like this, but I'd like to think that this is the way people learn to see the world as they grow. It allows us to take a quick look at something and find out where it belongs, if at all.

For instance, astrology does not belong with astronomy. It is part of psychology. It is a tool to make sense of the world. Kind of like religion - in fact, the two share a history. The actual constellations don't really matter: Chinese astrology use different ways of mapping the heavens, compared to the middle eastern tradition. The discovery of new planets Neptune and Pluto did not lead astrologers to throw their cards and resign in disgrace. Rather they incorporated the new planets as if those had always been meant to be. How is this? Astrology is not a science of the skies, but a science of the mind.

In a similar way, psychology today (and Psychology Today) strives to make sense of the human condition. Freud and Jung may look as different as Greek and Chinese astrology, but they still provide maps for the mind, for different people. But the maps are arbitrary divisions in a reality that is not divided. It is whole. It is one. But we cannot learn, nor teach, everything at once. So we have to break the One down into Many. We have to break the Truth down into small lies. And hope that it will some day rise again, whole, in other minds.