After you miss a field-goal kick, you might begin to see field goals as harder to make. And not just in the abstract: people who miss field goals start to perceive the post as being higher and narrower.
Your brain messes with you. Performance failures make you pessimistic, and in very specific ways:
Interestingly, the change in players’ perception didn’t just depend on how many goals they missed — it also mattered how they missed their goals. Folks who failed because they didn’t kick high enough perceived the crossbar to be taller, while those who kicked to the side viewed it as more narrow.
A lot of students are getting their first major exams back this week. To those of you who didn’t do as well as you wanted to, I say this: don’t let your brain psych you out of keeping at it. Learning a scientific discipline is hard enough without having to deal with doubts, fear, and optical illusions.
Filed under: tips | Tags: aliens, biochemistry, fear, narrative, textbooks
College biology textbooks often start with chemistry, so before even touching on cells or leaves or intestines, beginning general-bio students are faced with (roughly in this order): elements, atoms, subatomic particles, ions and isotopes, atomic orbitals, electron energy shells and the octet rule, covalent and ionic bonds, electronegativity, molecular polarity and its consequences for the properties of water, carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. All this in one chapter! It’s been hitting our beginning gen-bio students like water from a firehose, and the last couple weeks I’ve been seeing a lot of students who feel lost, intimidated, even freaked out.
What’s with the initial conceptual onslaught? One theory hypothesis, which I call the Intimidation Hypothesis of Biological Pedagogy, rests on the notion that many undergraduate biology programs want to see some sizable fraction of its students disappear before the registrar’s drop deadline. The hypothesis goes on to suggest that publishers accommodate these programs by front-loading their textbooks. I personally find this hypothesis plausible but untestable — and and not particularly helpful for students.
More useful is the Hypothesis That Science Isn’t Fiction. Imagine that instead of opening your hundred-dollar bio textbook, you’re opening a nine-dollar novel. The first chapter is typically easy-going: you meet some of the characters, you take a tour of the town or apartment building or starship, you get a general idea of what life is like before the main character gets dumped or the murder victim is found or whatever. In subsequent chapters things get complicated, but it’s all basically human stuff: people talk, fall in love, fight, murder each other, cook meals and blog about them, clone themselves and overthrow governments.
Now imagine the same novel, only now it’s written for space aliens. And not aliens like Cardassians (that is, grumpy human beings + forehead ridges) — I’m talking about aliens who are made of gas, who are the size of large asteroids, and who live in the majestic isolation of comets on millennium-scale orbits. An easy-going first chapter would no longer be adequate, because in order for the rest of the novel to make sense, there would be much more information that wold have to be conveyed. Information like what human beings are, what emotions do human beings experience, and how are they expressed. Like what is money, what are jobs, what is food, what’s a promotion, what’s a boss, what is murder, what’s a cop. Like what is a relationship, what is communication, what is the self. The book would have to start with basic definitions of the actors, how they interact, and what meanings those interactions have.
That’s what’s going on in that textbook. The characters in the bio text are not human beings, but molecules, gradients, tissues, biogeochemical processes, etc. The interactions are things like chemical bonds, catalysis of reactions, acid-base reactions, redox. It’s important stuff to understand, and we happen not to understand it already because we’re asteroid-sized gas-blimps peering through microscopes.
The good news is that the stuff in later chapters is different. Not necessarily easier, but probably not so alien-seeming.
