Laura’s Psychology Blog

A few months ago, I heard from Mark Melnychuk, who represented a group of Canadian journalism students who were in the process of exploring and documenting Maker Culture. Mark asked me what I thought of the Makers, and to be frank, I had to tell him I’d never heard of the movement before. After following some links Mark provided and doing a little digging on my own, I became quite fascinated by this movement. Essentially, these are people who are rejecting things made for them in favor of things they can put together for themselves, whether that is food, clothing, technology, or even science and education.

In their latest installment, the group talks about some of the fascinating projects they’ve encountered, from lattes that represent global warming to jewelry constructed from dried fruit to conducting genetic research on a home computer. The people engaged in maker culture use existing objects and technologies in new and creative ways, putting their own individual stamp on the result.

When Mark originally asked me to respond to Maker Culture from the point of view of a psychologist, my first reaction is that Making might just tap into some evolutionary sense of pleasure at building one’s own cultural artifacts and technology. We do not have any cultures, currently or historically, that did not develop characteristic ways of preparing foods, constructing clothing and shelter, and designing ornaments and tools. Perhaps the universality of these behaviors arises from some hard-wired positive response. We hunt, fish, and tend home gardens when ample food is just down the block at the supermarket. A quick trip to your local hardware store should convince you that people like to do home projects, even if they can afford to pay someone to do it. Gamers build their own from-scratch computers when huge selections of CPUs grace every electronics store.

In addition to the evolutionary reward aspect, it seems to me that Maker Culture also taps into our need to be individual. Anyone can eat at Red Lobster, buy a computer at Best Buy, or a bottle of wine at BevMo. Cultures have become increasingly homogeneous, with Colonel Sanders gracing a street corner in Auckland, New Zealand, and Starbucks in Beijing. Maybe by making something unique for yourself and your loved ones, we recapture that little bit of specialness we call individuality. As I write this, Mr. F is off expressing his individuality by making the ultimate tiramisu. I’m going to have to express my individuality to find a technical solution to sending a very large soundfile off to daughter Karen….What are you going to make?

In Biopsych, we often use prosopagnosia as a fun clinical example of what can go wrong with perception. However, it also appears that people can not only be impaired in facial recognition, but some are actually quite gifted–literally never forgetting a face. These “super recognizers” can recognize blurred faces, aged faces, and faces they have only seen in a crowd for a few seconds. Researchers are going to look for differences in brain activity that might account for this enhanced perception and memory.

"Super Recognizers" Can Even Pick Out Familiar Faces In Blurred Photos Like This One

If you want to test your face recognition abilities, the BBC has a fun test here.  I have never believed that I’m very good at remembering faces, and I was surprised at how well I did on this test.

I’ve been very excited about the enthusiasm of the leaders of the Cal Poly Neuroscience Club about getting to work on the long-awaited Neuroscience Minor. With our polytechnic mission, having Neuroscience programming for students is a natural. Yes, our budget is not exactly in a happy place, but we think we can put together an array of existing courses across several departments that will give our students great exposure to the field. We’re modeling as best we can the course array offered at UCLA (okay, it’s my alma mater three times over, but it also has some great neuroscience going on). The Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience has also been a valuable source of information.

The biggest job we face is to run a formal assessment of student demand for the program. We know it’s out there–my BioPsych students are always asking about what they can take next–but we have to document numbers for our administration. Still, it’s a great opportunity for students who want to get some practice in questionnaire design and implementation.

So hopefully, in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to give students not just the courses, but the label and identification they’ve wanted for a lot of years. Hats off to Cal Poly alum Zac Tabb, now serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, and current president Bryan Brandon and his hard-working officers for helping to make this a reality.

It’s an exciting time indeed to be a textbook author. I’m taking a break from translating my most recent intro work into a pdf document for reviewers–it’s a fair amount of work, but I think the reviewers’ job is easier when the don’t have to wade through a Word document with all the captions, features, and images lumped at the end. Plus, I get to play creative by placing a photo just so….it’s actually fun.

In the meantime, I think that publishers are doing a great job now of getting materials into student hands at reduced costs. As you can see from the image below, my bio book is available in several formats. Students seem to really like the rental option, but my favorite is the eBooks. At first, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of reading on a computer screen, but was won over by a student who pointed out you can SEARCH using the eBook. Wow. How that would have changed my student life! The eBook comes with the study guide materials included, too, which is a big savings.

Lots of Textbook Options

I’m hoping to ask a quick clicker question this week (our third of the quarter) to see what students have opted to do about books. Should be interesting!

Of course, the big boys (aka the commercial booksellers) are already in threat mode about the publishers providing direct sales to students. I read recently that one big chain was offering more textbooks for rent, too. They must be scared. The big difference is that when you rent or buy from the publisher directly, you’re actually helping to keep textbook costs down, but when you rent or buy from a campus bookstore or other retail chain, you’re making books more expensive. When the big boy retailers recycle our work, they don’t pay us a dime, which means that we have to pay the artists, editors, indexers, photo researchers, and all the other people who contribute to the work by charging more for new books. I don’t think the chain prices are much less, either, in spite of the fact that they’re getting all of our hard work for free.

So between you and me? I’d choose the publisher direct option. It’s only fair, and in the long run, it’s the only way to make the cost of books come down. Nobody resells Harry Potter, which costs about $20 because the publisher can spread all costs across all users. The more people who use chain stores for textbooks, the fewer actually support the costs of production, and books have to be more expensive.

Along the same theme as my previous blog post, our family was asked to participate in an interview with our local NBC affiliate for a segment on New Year’s Resolutions. We received a phone call from our Jenny Craig Centre director, asking us if we would be willing to do this in the next half hour, so we all piled into the car (usually we walk the one mile to the Centre). I suppose we are a good story of weight loss for the new year. Collectively, our family has lost a medium-sized NFL linebacker by using Jenny Craig.

Kristin, Karen, and I check out the "I Did It" bulletin board at Jenny Craig prior to our interview

Once there, the journalist conducting the interview asked who wanted to do most of the talking, and unfortunately, everybody pointed at me. I guess I do get paid to talk, so that’s probably fair. After we did a short interview about how Jenny Craig helps us meet our weight loss and maintenance goals, the journalist took some more video, including Mr. F’s feet as he stepped on the Centre scale. As one of our family’s favorite films is Zoolander, Karen had to ask if Dad’s feet were able to do “blue steel” or “magnum.”

We didn’t stay up until 11 p.m., when the segment was supposed to show, because we had to get up at 2 a.m. to get Karen to her very early flight out of Santa Barbara to go back to school. We’re guessing that Mr. F’s feet may have been the part that stayed in….