This is the tenth post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project (find first post here). In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential,” it continues question two: “Call to Adventure” Name an experience or opportunity that made you aware of a new skill or insight? The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.
Psychological Problems
I had zero doubt that my journalism major and advertising specialization would keep me on my bestselling author track. And while I’d managed to keep my general studies requirements reading or writing related for my entire freshman year, as a sophomore, I was forced to branch out.
Abnormal Psychology seemed ripe for story ideas, but in a world of prerequisites, I had to get through Psychology 101 to get there. During the first session, we were told that instead of just reading about psychology, we would play a role in advancing the field!
The professor invited us to participate in a ground-breaking sleep study that he was conducting. This would involve spending nights in a sleep lab hooked up to electrodes that would monitor our brain activity. I didn’t hear much else during that first session. Sleep was a touchy subject for me. I often suffered bouts of insomnia and had to take sleep where I could find it.
After class, we were instructed to see the Teacher’s Assistant to get the necessary waivers for the study. I explained my sleep situation.
“A lot of students have insomnia,” he said. “You’re exactly the kind of subject this study was designed to help.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not going to do it.”
“It’s required to complete the course.”
“Then I’ll drop the course.”
I turned to leave.
“Hold on.”
He recruited a volunteer to pass out the paperwork and ran to chase down the professor. The class emptied out and I was about to leave when he came back, a little out of breath. He was on the heavy side.
“Okay,” he said. “If you really want to, you can write detailed summaries of nine journal articles, but participating in the study is much easier.”
“Summaries it is,” I said.
He shook his head in resignation. “I’ll bring the format requirements to the next session. You can look them over and let us know if you want to change your mind.”
“I won’t,” I said.
The TA was right. The sleep study would have been easier, but writing detailed papers on journal articles wasn’t hard. It was merely tedious. And when you’re determined to become a bestselling author, almost everything that gets in the way of that goal is tedious in one way or another. I was prepared for it. What I wasn’t prepared for was what the studies suggested.
In the first study, I concluded that the range of subjects (freshman college students) was a far too narrow sampling of the population to draw the sort of universal conclusions experimenters claimed. Further, there was no clear connection between the study’s methodology and either the hypothesis or conclusion.
I doubted that the professor would be pleased with my assessment, but I also doubted that he, or anyone, would ever read it. I had typed it in the correct format. One study down, eight to go.
Different hypothesis, same flaws.
Was I choosing the wrong studies? I talked to one of the librarians and learned how to select studies that were cited most often. The disconnect between hypothesis, methodology, and conclusion here seemed even greater. A disconcerting notion occurred to me. Was it possible that no one had read these studies? Including the people who had cited them? I understood that they were peer-reviewed, but if all your peers did such shoddy work…
Both the students who had completed the study and I received full credit in lieu of a mid-term exam. But the lion’s share of our grade depended on the final.
I wasn’t sure how well I had done matching ambiguous questions to answers from a newly published textbook that had been handsomely designed but poorly written and edited. I arrived at the final abbreviated session with anxiety.
The TA informed us that we weren’t to leave after we received our final scores because the professor had something important to say. My last name afforded me relatively early access to my composite score: 71. Shit!
As more students received their scores, I could tell I wasn’t alone in my disappointment. One student looked at his score and said, “Fuck this course!”
“Wait a minute,” said the TA.
The student gave him the finger and stormed out. The professor entered, concerned. He stepped to the podium.
“I apologize for that,” he said. “I should have spoken before handing out the scores.”
He began what seemed like another incomprehensible lecture with an overhead projection of a bell curve representing the grade distribution for our final exam. He overlaid the one from the previous semester and one from two years ago. They were all very similar.
He said that the only difference was the score at the top of the bell. In the previous two, it had been 95 and 97. This semester it had been 81.
Since the only variable that had changed was the adoption of a new textbook, the professor would have to assume that the book had been responsible for the lower scores. He put up a revised grading scale of composite scores to conform to the adjusted curve.
My low C became a high B.
What the professor had left out of his scientific explanation was that he had co-authored the textbook responsible for the lower scores. Whether he was changing the grading scale to remain true to science or to save his ass when it came to teacher evaluation scores was anyone’s guess, but I had learned enough from my homework to recognize it was consistent with the literature.
Fuzzy Logic
The hardest thing about Philosophy 101 was the time slot: Tuesdays at 7:00 p.m. I had optimized my schedule for fully-loaded Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Once I trekked over to campus from the dorms, I could stay there all day with one hour for lunch split between the student center and the library. I could devote Thursdays to getting my weekly classwork done. The only blot on Tuesdays was philosophy.
The associate professor low enough on the philosophical totem pole to draw the introductory course decided to make it interesting by proving irrefutably that God existed.
Anselm of Canterbury had come up with this line of reasoning.
Argument: God is that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought, and since a God who exists is greater than a God who does not, God must therefore exist.
Refutation: The world is full of perfect unicorns, which must exist because a unicorn that exists is greater than one that does not.
Argument: Aha! But God is by definition greater than unicorns, so while unicorns don’t have to exist, God, by virtue of being the greatest, must.
There were many more words, but no more logic. We were about to move on when I was reminded of that newspaper columnist who believed fairies danced on our lawns when we were asleep.
I raised my hand. “How does Anselm prove it’s greater to exist than not to exist?”
I was shocked by the prof’s non-response. He seemed genuinely surprised, “That’s a very good question,” he said. “Thoughts, anyone?”
No one came up with a counterargument to my refutation.
That night, as I walked home, it bothered me that it had been so easy to see through an argument that had survived nearly 1,000 years to make it into a fat, expensive college textbook.
The cosmological argument wasn’t much trickier to refute. All things in nature depend on something else for their existence, so the whole cosmos must therefore rely on a being that exists independently.
“Why couldn’t all things in nature exist interdependently?”
Another good question that met with no argument.
How about the teleological argument? Our discovery of orderly patterns found in nature proves that they were designed by a separate entity: God. “Or it might prove that beings that notice patterns are more likely to reproduce than beings that don’t.”
After weeks of coming home and bitching to my roommate, one Tuesday he said he was going to go see a movie and asked if I wanted to go.
Argument: If I got nothing from class, wouldn’t I be better off not going?
I stopped attending and still aced the mid-term and the final.
An unintended consequence of my misadventures in psychology and philosophy was the beginning of my evolution from skepticism (questioning accepted opinions) to cynicism (believing people are motivated purely by self-interest).
And while uncovering patterns in the natural world couldn’t prove to me that God existed, my most memorable general studies course would make me a believer in intelligent design.
Photo by: schach100
