Professor Hercules, Ph.D.

First, let me explain. I know that the URL above says blogspot.com and that by default makes me a "blogger." Further, I realize that the title above contains the word psychology which also by default breads expectations for paragraphs on emotions, descriptions of disorders, and the inevitable stop-overmedicating-America's-children! arguments. You're not going to find that here. I'm not going to write about feelings--yours or mine--and I'm definitely not going to write about politics. I'll leave that to Johnama. See what I did there?

As a budding scientist I am disturbed by defining concepts by what they are not and therefore I shall attempt to explicate exactly what I wish to achieve with a blog. The major goal of my writing is to disseminate the "cutting edge" of basic cognitive research being conducted by myself and others to a broader audience. In doing so, I hope to learn to more clearly communicate my research to a general audience. And just maybe you'll learn something as well.

Before we get into the nitty gritties of lexical decisions, heirarchical linear regressions, and multinomial models let me tell you a little about hydra psychology. I am first and foremost a psychologist, but one that is bound, fueled, and stimulated by what I call the Hydra Principle. A little background information....

In Greek mythology, there existed a large snake-like monster with multiple heads called a Hydra. It rampaged, it killed, and it had very bad breath. Eventually, the gods had enough of the Hydra monster and sent Hercules to dispose of the serpent beast. So Hercules confronted the Hydra, and being a skilled warrior, he was able to quickly slice off one of the monster's heads. To his shock and horror, instead of the monster collapsing in beheadedness it grew two heads in place of the one that had been cut off. This pattern continued which each swing of the hero's blade. Every time a head was cut off, two sprung up in its place.

So that's a hydra, but what's the Hydra Principle and how does it apply to a scientist?

Well, whenever I answer a research question, two questions pop up in its place. Whenever I finish an experiment I have to conduct two more. To illustrate, when I entered graduate school I was given 2 projects (one experiment each) to work on. I completed experiment 1 for project A and the results begged us to conduct a second experiment. The results of the second experiment were also intriguing and we therefore wanted to conduct a third experiment. Ok so that's three experiments. Were we satisfied yet? No, because we had to write up the 3-experiment project and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. As a sidenote I should mention that submitted papers are sent out to "experts" in the pertinent field to review the paper (the methodology, statistics, theoretical conclusions, etc.), and journal editors use the reviews to determine whether to accept, reject, or invite a revision/resubmission of the paper. High quality journals never accept papers on their first submission.

Well, about 6 weeks after submitting our paper the editor responded with the reviews which were, in general, pretty positive. But guess what? They wanted us to collect more data before we resubmitted. They suggested a particular experiment, and being the hydra-crazed lunatic that I am, I suggested an idea for another experiment as well. So two more experiments for the project that just won't die.

That was project A. How about project B? I took over project B from another grad student in the lab so when I say experiment 1 for project B, I really mean experiment 3. As you can see, the hydra principle was already hard at work for this project. Like the project I discussed above, project B just won't die. In the last year I have conducted 3 experiments for it and I'm planning a fourth. I keep telling myself it the fourth will be the last experiment for this project but who am I kidding?

What's even scarier about the hydra principle is that it not only works within projects (i.e., multiplicative experiments in a single line of research) but also between projects (i.e., multiplicative lines of research). So when I thought I was going to begin a project C, I was really beginning a project C and D. And when I thought it was a good time to start project E, I was really starting project E and F (remember, each project has their own multiplying experiments). Maybe I'm an idiot or maybe I just didn't have any choice, but I just began project G. I guess I should expect to start project H next week.

As illustrated above, the hydra principle is the empirical finding that "completed" studies spawn new questions and new projects. Further, these new projects do not just cancel out your completed projects, but instead grow exponentially so as to overwhelm you with unanswered research questions. Such is the life of a scientist.

That's all for tonight. Next time we'll get past the principle and dive into what some of these projects have been designed to investigate. I'm thinking that I'll write a little bit about a currently "hot" line of research called survival processing that's designed to investigate the evolutionary processes that appear to have given rise to memory biases in humans. How's that for an amuse bouche?