Generally Thinking

Month: November 2009

  • How to find elusive papers and books

    You may be familiar with this scenario. You’re doing an essay, or revising for an exam, and there’s one annoying paper or book that you just can’t seem to find. Before you shell out for a full price book or a pdf paper (pdfs can cost $20 each!), there are a few tricks that improve your chances of finding the elusive literature. Follow the steps below in the given order. They rarely fail. In fact I can think of only one time that I’ve had to buy a paper online, and even that was some rare FBI report on serial killers.

    Finding elusive journal papers

    1) Online Databases

    Start by searching the online databases you have access to through your university. If you have an ATHENS account, EBSCO is where you can find PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES. Check your universities intranet portal, if they have a useful papers section or something similar. Also register at Science Direct and check there. These should be your first ports of call.

    2) Google Scholar

    Search Google Scholar. Search for the full title of the paper first, and if that doesn’t work, just search for a snip of it that has no question marks or colons in it. Sometimes searching for the full title doesn’t bring up a paper that’s actually there, for some odd reason.

    3) Normal Google

    Search for the title of the paper in normal Google. Sometimes this will bring up a page hosting the paper, or the author’s personal website.

    4) Authors’ websites

    Google the names of each of the researchers in the paper. Check all their personal websites, just in case the Google search didn’t pick them up for some reason. If none of the authors have the paper available for download (sometimes, annoyingly, they just have a list of papers without download links), email the first author and ask if they have a pdf they could send you. Say your doing an essay and really need the paper for your assignment. Don’t write a seven page explanation of why you want it, and don’t be surprised if you get a reply with no content, just the paper as an attachment. They are not being rude, they just get about a million emails a day. The times I’ve had to do this I’ve always gotten prompt replies. If the first author can’t or won’t send you a copy, email the second author, and so on.

    5) Fellow students

    Email/ask your fellow students who are doing the same assignment if they have it. Ask the lecturer who is giving the class if they have it.

    6) Hard copies

    Check your universities holdings to see if they have a paper version of it. This is unlikely if it doesn’t show up in the online searches, but possible.

    7) Other universities

    Check other universities. Search their online catalogues first, to see if they have the journal you want. Obviously start with the closest one and move outwards. I don’t know about the US, but here in the UK there are schemes to allow you to access other libraries and get books out (SCONUL), and most will also allow you to join as a guest for the day (sometimes for a price).

    Finding elusive books

    1) University library

    Obviously, start with your university library.

    2) Google Books

    Search Google Books for it. If it’s on there, you are able to search inside the book, and you get a few preview pages. By using relevant search keywords, you can often bring up the few pages of the book that you need, get the info you want, and copy and paste a quote if necessary. Amazon‘s ‘Search Inside’ feature serves a similar purpose.

    3) Bookstores

    If you don’t need to read a whole book, go to a bookstore that will have it. At this point you’ll have to use some stealthy method to extract the information you want. If your phone has a good camera, you can photograph the pages, else you can copy out the quote you need into a text message and save it into your drafts. At the very least, you can read the section you want.

    4) Amazon/Ebay

    Check Amazon and Ebay. Can you get a used copy for just a few quid? If so, consider buying a copy. It might cost you the same as it would to travel to another university, so this is worth checking first. I once got a copy of Dan Dennett’s Elbow Room for less than £2. If you won’t need the book after the assignment, donate it to your university library when you’re done (do this whenever you have psychology books you no longer need – you will feel good inside, and the library staff will look kindly upon you, which is always useful).

    5) Other universities

    Check other universities’ libraries. As with journal papers, check the online catalogue before making the trip!

    6) Local libraries

    Look in large local libraries. This is a long-shot if the above methods haven’t worked, but if it’s a large one like the British Library, there’s a chance.

    These should do the trick. If you get an electronic version of a paper, make sure you keep it! Then if you need it again you won’t have to go through this whole process again. Make a folder called ‘Journal Papers’ and inside that have a folder for each particular field. Another big time saver is to write your references in a text file as you go along. With text edit on the mac you can ‘paste and match style’ (command+alt+shift+v), so that it’s pasted in the same font and font size.

    Also, you can google the name of the paper, not to find the paper itself but to find one in which it has been cited in APA format. Then copy from their reference list, paste and match style into your file, et voila – a full reference list in proper APA format, all commas and dots in the right places. EBSCO has a ‘cite this paper’ button at the bottom of each page that you can use for the same purpose.

  • Absolute beginner’s guide to having a lucid dream

    A lucid dream is quite a different experience to a normal one. In a normal dream, the experience is like a film. You’re just watching what goes on, albeit from a first-person perspective, and you cannot control anything despite an illusory sense of agency.

    In a lucid dream, you wake up during the film. You are as conscious as you are right now, reading this. You are able to make choices, move around, and in most cases, you are able to dictate what happens in your dream environment (it is a product of your own mind, after all).

    This means you can do whatever you want in your dreams, have whatever dream you want to have. What is more, a lucid dream seems far more real than a normal one. Everything is lifelike and vivid, almost to the level you experience in real life, and sometimes more.

    This article is a brief overview of the techniques I use to trigger a lucid dream. Using these, especially the ‘sledgehammer method’ you should be able to have a lucid dream quickly, within the first week probably. I found these techniques from a combination of a lot of time spent searching the internet, and using Stephen LaBerge’s book ‘Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming‘.

    1) Write your dreams down

    journal_bed
    (Bekah Stargazing)

    Throughout all the sources I have found, this is the only universal tip. You keep a pad of paper – or preferably a journal you use solely for this purpose, and a pen by your bed. Every time you wake up, jot down the details of the last dream you had. There two main reasons for this. The first, is that this helps you to remember the dreams you have. You might have 3-4 dreams per night, but it’s likely you remember only one, at the most. By keeping track, you train yourself to remember dreams, which is very useful – there’s no point in having a lucid dream if you don’t remember it in the morning. Secondly, you can look over your diary of dreams, you can begin to notice things that repeatedly occur, maybe a particular location, event, person, character, object, scenario: whatever. You should then make a note of these recurring themes, known as ‘dreamsigns’ (more on this later).

    2) Reality Checks

    The primary way to become lucid during a dream is to consciously realise that you are dreaming. Your dreams are very often a reflection of your waking life, so you can use this to your advantage by performing ‘reality checks’, around 10-15 times per day. There are certain things that can and cannot occur during a dream, and by making a serious and deliberate check of these things regularly throughout the day, you will eventually find yourself making the same checks in a dream.

    The difference is, when you are dreaming you will necessarily fail the tests, therefore realise you are dreaming, and become lucid. Here are the tests you should do:

    a) Ask yourself “Am I awake, or am I dreaming right now?”.

    It is important to take this test seriously, and assume that you are actually dreaming and attempt to disprove that ‘fact’. Because, as LeBerge notes in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, if you simply take it as an obvious fact that you are awake, you will simply replicate this assumption in your dreams. Be aware of your situation and perceptions. Have a look around for anything dream-like.

    b) Check some writing

    jumbled_writing
    (D Sharon Pruitt)

    Find some text. Look at it, look away, then look back. Do it again. If the text changes, you are dreaming. If it stays the same, you are awake. I had this happen in one of the dreams in which I became lucid. I was reading a magazine, then decided to do a reality check. I looked away, looked back, and repeated this. To my surprise, the text kept changing. I realised I was in a dream, and became lucid. As I did, the whole experience became more vivid and lifelike. Fascinated, I looked again at the magazine (which I could now feel in my hand, and see the separate pages of, just as if it were real) several times. The text changed into a different jumbly mess of letters each time.

    c) See if you can fly or float

    Obviously, you can’t do this in real life. So if you can fly, float, or hover, you must clearly be in a dream. Try to do these during your reality check; try to will yourself to hover, or jump in the air and see if it takes a strangely long time before you land. If it does, you’re dreaming.

    d) Check your memory

    Memory doesn’t work all that well in dreams. Think back over what you’ve done over the last hour and beyond. Can you think of any details? If the details are hazy, you are dreaming.

    When should you do your reality checks? Do them at regular points throughout the day, so that it becomes routine to do so. Do a decent amount each day – 10-15 should do it, and preferably try each of the above methods on each check. Try using set times, when waking, when brushing teeth, when on the bus/in the car to work/school, when eating lunch, etc etc.

    As well as your chosen set times, perform a reality check every time you come across a dreamsign in real life. For example, I often find myself dreaming that I’m in a kitchen or a bathroom. Invariably, they are incredibly strange versions of such rooms, but I just accept them as normal. By doing a reality check every time I’m in a kitchen while awake, I find myself doing so in dreams too.

    You can also visualise yourself seeing dreamsigns, and then doing a reality check that you fail, leading to a lucid dream. This will be useful if you have a dreamsign that you are unlikely to encounter in real life, such as an old friend you don’t see anymore, or something more abstract.

    3) Fall asleep hoping

    As you lie in bed, think about lucid dreams, and repeat your intention to have a lucid dream mentally. If your mind wanders to something else, bring it back to the affirmation that you intend to notice you are dreaming and become lucid tonight. This might help you fall asleep faster too, because your mind isn’t wandering.

    4) Sledgehammer Technique

    sledgehammer
    (Matti Mattila)

    There is definitely a technical name for this, but I can’t remember it and I like this better! This is the single most effective way to have a lucid dream. Unfortunately, it is the most intrusive to your schedule.

    First, a few facts:

    • When we sleep, our brain cycles through different patterns or ‘stages’ of activity.
    • We dream in the ‘REM’ stage of sleep.
    • As the night goes on, periods of REM sleep get longer and longer.
    • If we are cut off from getting REM sleep, we tend to enter it immediately when we do eventually sleep.

    We can take advantage of these facts. First set an alarm for 5-6 hours into our sleep period. Then, we get up, and out of bed. This is hard to do.

    While you are awake, drill the idea of lucid dreams into your head. Have a few websites bookmarked to read during this time (such as this one), print out a few articles to read, and if you have a book on lucid dreaming, read that.

    Stay up for an hour or two doing this, just reading and thinking about lucid dreams. Do a load of reality checks, especially the visualisation ones described earlier. This really is the sledgehammer approach; overload yourself with thoughts, intentions, and information about lucid dreaming – prime yourself. Then go back to bed, and apply technique 3, above.

    If you do this, you are very, very likely to have a lucid dream. I had one on my second night trying this. Of course, this is most effective when combined with all the above techniques, so the more dreams you have logged and the more dreamsigns and reality checks you have done in the past, the more likely it is to work. But it is highly effective as a stand-alone technique.

    Another tip, is to decide what you want to do during a lucid dream, so that you don’t waste time deciding. Apparently, lucid dreams occur at a normal rate of time, so time is of the essence.

    Hope these tips are useful, if you don’t get quick results please persevere, because I promise that lucid dreams exist and can be learned, I’ve done it myself so I would know! At the same time, this is a skill just like any other, and it may be some weeks or even months before you start having lucid dreams on a consistent basis. Make sure you don’t skip the step of writing your dreams down. Good luck!

    Recommended Reading:

  • The Buddhist Brain

    What happens to the brain if you spend 44,000 hours in focused meditation?

    This is a question Richard Davidson and his neuroscience team asked. To answer it, they took experienced Tibetan monks to their lab at the University of Wisconsin, and took various scans of their brains. Is the Buddhist brain fundamentally different than the average?

    Types of meditation

    Buddhism includes various types of meditation, which can be grouped into three main categories: focused attention, where the aim is to focus on one object or sensation, to the exclusion of everything else; open monitoring, where the aim is to increase awareness of all perceptions, without focusing on anything in particular; and compassion meditation, where the goal is to produce an overwhelming and unconditional mental state of kindness to all things. These all have different effects on the Buddhist brain, as we’ll see.

    Buddhist Brain
    Obligatory meditation image. (Johan Stigwall)

    Focused Attention

    As would be expected, focused attention meditation increases activation in the brain areas implicated in the control and regulation of attention, such as the prefrontal cortex. The activation is higher in meditators with more experience, up to a point of about 19,000 hours practice. After 44,000 practice, there is an initial increase in activation, followed by a return to baseline.  This means that after extensive training, it takes little effort for the attention to be controlled.

    There are also differences in another brain area – the amygdala. This is an older part of the brain involved in emotion. Expert meditators have less amygdala activation than novices in response to emotional sounds. While sat in the MRI, novice and expert meditators were bombarded with distracting, emotionally provoking noises, such as a baby crying.  Novices react to it, but while experts do hear the sound, they don’t react to it. They are less emotionally reactive to external events, and can hold their concentration in situations where in anyone else, the amygdala would be firing up so strongly that they would be powerless to resist its goal of redirecting their attention.

    Open Monitoring

    The overall effect of open monitoring is that the meditator is able to attend to all the stimuli coming at them, without getting ‘stuck’ on anything. They can just sit back and watch it all, or engage and disengage their attention as they please.

    When under an EEG scan, the meditators were able to increase the gamma-band oscillations in their brain; these are usually quite weak, and difficult to detect. Gamma bands are important in attention and perception, but also in the transmission and integration of information across the brain. It is thought that this type of activity helps to integrate distributed neural processes into more ordered functions. There was also a change in the gamma bands when the monks weren’t meditating; showing that the ‘default’ setting had been altered.

    Compassion Meditation

    This type of meditation involves deliberately generating a state of unconditional compassion and kindness towards all beings, that saturates the whole mind. This is said to create more spontaneous acts of altruism in the meditator.

    This was studied through fMRI scans. After thousands of hours of compassion meditation, the expert meditators were able to increase their empathic response to other peoples’ social signals. The brain area involved (the insula) is thicker in expert meditators than novices, and there was also greater activation in the areas associated with reading others’ mental states. In other words, by systematically creating a concern for others, the meditators are better able to process the emotions of others.

    These have been quite revolutionary findings in neuroscience, showing that things like attention can be trained and develop, where previously they had been thought to be relatively fixed.

    Recommended Reading: