A Tale of Sleep Deprivation, Mozart, and Magic Chalk Circles

Picture credit: xkcd.com

Last semester, I took a neuroscience course, during which my professor explained to us that a moderate amount of sleep deprivation is the functional equivalent to being drunk. This is something I (and many other people) have intuited due to experiences with late-night slap-happiness, but it was interesting to learn that this idea had a neurological basis and, you know, empirical evidence to back it up.

Science, man. Science.

Anyhow, the point is that if sleep deprivation = alcohol consumption, then I have spent the past 48 hours in states ranging from mildly buzzed to rather drunk. Some friends (Michael in particular) got a good laugh out of this; other expressed their concern that I get some sleep. And I did get some sleep, eventually. (I’ll get lots more tonight.)

But all of that sleep deprivation is going to pay off. Because on Saturday night, three things will happen:

1. I will go sing Mozart’s Requiem with my choir (which is an awesome piece of music).
2. I will go back to my room and send out queries and partials (something I have been planning to do since I was a kid).
3. My friend(s) will grab some chalk and string and a straight edge, kidnap me as soon as I have completed Item #2, and go draw spelling circles with me all over campus to celebrate.

Yeah, being the functional equivalent of drunk isn’t always fun. But I kind of love my life.

The Psychology of Halloween (or, How to Creep Out Your Characters and Readers)

Halloween is awesome.

I know, I know. Kind of a “duh” thing to say. Candy and costumes and running around in the dark with friends—I mean, what’s not to love? Ask American kids and teens about their favorite holiday, and I guarantee that Halloween will be somewhere near the top of the list.

Most college students seem to fall into two basic camps where Halloween is concerned: those without the time or inclination to dress up, and those awesome nerds who plan their costumes weeks in advance. I have a lot of friends in the latter group, but I myself tend to fall into the former: usually, I have no idea what to dress up as and simply lack the time to really put some thought and effort into it.

This year, though, I got lucky. The night before Halloween, I outsourced my costuming decision to said nerdy friends, basically asking them who/what I should be for Halloween. This was a brilliant choice. With their help, I managed to scrape together a ridiculously last-minute costume (seriously, it came together in the space of about half an hour):

I have to admit that I’m inordinately pleased with the results. Ten points to you if you recognize the outfit! (I’ll give you a hint: here’s a close-up of the pin on the jacket.)

Anyhow, on to what I actually wanted to talk about:

As you may or may not know, I’m a psychology major, and as my troupe of friends (who were mostly dressed as the crew from Firefly) and I roamed across campus on the evening of October 31st, drinking cocoa at the university president’s house and attending epic orchestra concerts, I couldn’t help thinking about the psychology of Halloween. Because believe you me, there’s a lot of fascinating psych stuff that is relevant to this holiday, and frankly, I think a lot of it is very relevant for fiction writers. So without further ado, I present to you three creepy psychology tidbits that I think any fiction writer can use to his/her advantage:

1. Masks

Masks are extremely powerful on a psychological level. Why? I don’t know for sure if psychologists have isolated a mechanism, but my understanding/intuition is that it’s because they have the effect of making people feel like they are anonymous. Which is silly. I mean, from a logical perspective, this is not necessarily a given. When you put on a mask, there are still other ways to identify you—your clothes, your hair, your mannerisms and posture and voice.

But human beings are NOT logical, as Kirk is so fond of pointing out to Spock. And the fact of the matter is that masks are one of the surest ways to make people do bad things. Just putting masks on kids makes them more likely to cheat, steal, and just generally be mean to each other. Mobs in masks? *shudders* Why do you think the KKK wear those hoods? Additionally, masks can work well as a fear/intimidation tool because it makes us uncomfortable when we can’t see another person’s facial features. We can’t read their expressions; we can’t know what their intentions are. I know this all sort of seems like a no-brainer, but it’s intriguing to think about in terms of the psychology of characters. Need a character to do something horrendous? Put him/her in mask. Need to frighten a character? Make him/her encounter someone wearing a mask.

2. The Uncanny Valley

You know how dolls can just look…wrong? Not all, but some? What is it about things that look almost-human-but-not-quite that we find so creepy? One hypothesis is that of the “uncanny valley”, which suggests that the closer we get to something that looks human but isn’t, the more unnerved we are by it. Interestingly, you see this idea brought up most frequently in robotics and CGI animation, both of which have to deal with the fact that creating things that look/act almost human may creep people out more than anything else.

So apart from the fact that creepy dolls make for excellent Halloween costumes, how is this useful to fiction writers? Well, once again, it’s good for knowing what you (as an author) can use to scare your characters (and, of course, your readers). It’s true that we have this intuition that swarms of little goblin-y things with sharp teeth would be terrifying in real life. But wouldn’t you also be super freaked-out by a tall, humanoid, expressionless being—one that is just inexplicably wrong—that followed you around and simply stared at you?

There you have it: the uncanny valley at work.

3. The Bystander Effect

You’re out trick-or-treating and are walking down a nearly-deserted street. A little way ahead of you, a man is crossing the road at a crosswalk when suddenly, out of nowhere, a car comes zooming into the intersection and sends the man flying. The car roars away down the street—the driver is clearly unwilling to take responsibility for his mistake—leaving the man lying motionless in the road.

What do you do?

If you’re a normal, empathic human being, chances are that your first instinct would be to run to the man’s side and/or call 911 to make sure help is on the way. You might check to make sure he’s breathing; you might perform CPR if necessary; you might try to staunch the bloodflow from his scalp-wound with the hem of your Dracula cape. Because you are a good person and because that’s what you’d want someone to do for you if you were the victim of a hit-and-run.

But what if there are five other people in the vicinity of the accident? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Does your reaction change at all? “No!” you say. “Of course not! I’m a good person—that’s what a good person would do.”

Well I hate to break it to you…but statistically-speaking, you are oh-so wrong. Because the more people who witness someone in distress, the lower the chance that person will get the care s/he so desperately needs. This is what is known as the bystander effect, and it is caused by a diffusion of responsibility. When you’re part of a crowd, you look around at all the other people and think, “Well, I don’t have to act, because one of them can do it.” The only problem being that if everybody thinks this, then nobody acts, and you all end up just staring:

Another contributing factor may be that we are less reluctant to act in a non-socially-acceptable way while part of a group. So if helping that stranger in need involves drawing attention to yourself by screaming for help and running to his side, then you have less of an incentive to do it because you’ll stand out from the crowd if you do.

The applications of the bystander effect in fiction are fascinating. Consider the moral angst you can put a character through when he realizes that he simply stood and watched while a woman had an epileptic fit on the floor of a mall. Or create a creepy, “The Lottery“-esque scenario where a crowd watches wordlessly as some atrocity or other is committed.

And finally, a hopeful note: in spite of the title of this article, we are not doomed as a species because of the bystander effect (nor because of the other experiments it mentions). The bystander effect is easy to combat, and this can be done in two concrete ways. The first is simply knowing that it exists. The second is that if you find yourself in distress in a crowd of people, pick an individual in your immediate vicinity, point to him/her, and address that person directly, e.g. “Hey you! You, in the yellow shirt! Help me!” Your chances of getting a response are much, much higher if you do.

So, dear readers and raptors:

1) Do any of your current writing projects make use of these facts?

2) Do any of them stand out to you as being particularly creepy and/or something you’d like to try using in a story?

3) Have you ever experienced the bystander effect? Been freaked out by the uncanny valley? Felt empowered to do evil while wearing a mask? Leave a comment and tell me all about it!

A Major Dilemma, Part II (or, People Are Super Weird…and That’s Super Interesting)

(Click here to read Part I of the saga)

I still haven’t adapted to not being an English major. By dint of having spent so much time anticipating that l’anglais would be my path, I’ve developed a number of English-major habits that must now be adjusted.

“No, that’s definitely not how you spell ‘mediocrity’. Trust me, I’m an–”

Oh wait. No I’m not.

So what am I? Not that I expect you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting for the thrilling conclusion, but I figure you do at least deserve to find out.

Returning to school this year, I had firmly set my sights on the English track, and particularly on the writing concentration. Sadly, my university does not have a creative writing program, but the writing branch of the English major seemed an acceptable option. After all, one of the options for a writing concentration senior thesis was to submit “a long work of fiction”.

A lie.

Hell, I write novels every November for fun. I even started my school’s Noveling Club. A long work of fiction as a senior thesis seemed like handing my degree to me on a platter. A platter covered in delicious, candle-strewn cake with the framed (and fireproof) degree set on top. YUM. Again, with an opportunity like that, how could I not be an English major?

But as everyone who has ever played Portal knows, the cake is a lie. And it is often followed by death.

You know this part of the story already. I picked my classes with great care. I was excited to try them. I attended the first day, which was universally uneventful because it was mostly about the syllabus and whatnot.

So it wasn’t until the second day of class that I found myself gazing despondently at the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and wishing I could apparate to my high school English teacher’s house and have a literary discussion that I actually cared about.

Mr. C

My dad always teases me by saying that two years of class with Mr. C spoiled me for all other literature classes–and I think he’s absolutely right. Kind, thoughtful, soft-spoken, funny, and passionate about stories and words, Mr. C was one of those teachers who inspired such zealous devotion in his students because he made literature relatable and he made it matter. Of course, literature always mattered to me, but that doesn’t mean Mr. C wasn’t a remarkable man and a big influence on my life. I loved his classes and his quirky quizzes and his thoughtful comments. One of my classmates once remarked that Mr. C treated characters and authors with the exact same love and respect that he showed real people. Truer words were ne’er spoken.

I also still vividly remember him telling me that he thought I had a gift for writing–I think I glowed for the rest of the week.

So college-style English was not for me…but this realization left me in a panicky state of confusion. It was already the second week of classes, and I wanted to change my major. That meant picking out a whole new course schedule. It also meant deciding (and deciding FAST) what it was I wanted to spend the next two years studying.

Which is how I hit upon psychology.

When I thought back to the courses I’d enjoyed the most in the past year, two of them turned out to be psychology courses. I didn’t take them because I wanted to be a psych major; I just took them because they were fun and super-interesting.

Those are key words, though. “Fun and super-interesting.”

I decided to give  it a shot. So the next day, I sat in on some psych courses and found that they were all far more enjoyable than my English courses. After shopping three such classes, it was the work of a moment to go to my online student account, adjust my course schedule, and officially switch my major to psychology.

Impulsive decisions do have some consequences, though. That’s not to say that becoming a psych major has been a bad decision–merely that the speed with which this shift happened made me question the validity of my reasons for doing it. I was certainly relieved to be taking courses that I actually liked, but as with last semester, I found myself wondering whether I had any right to judge an entire department by a few classes.

More than anything, though, the change made me sad. I wasn’t sad to be a psych major; I was sad about not being an English major. The word that repeatedly comes to mind is “thwarted”–I felt like I’d been unfairly deprived of something I’d always expected to have. Plus, all my post-college plans were related to English. Not that I couldn’t be a writer or get a publishing internship with a psychology degree–a psych degree has all sorts of useful applications–but it still felt peculiar to contemplate. I desperately wanted some avenue of recourse.

But how could I go to the English department and say, “I don’t like the way you teach–would you please change?” In other departments at other schools, this might be possible…but trust me when I say that such a comment would not go over well here. I think my school ‘s English department is too old and sunk too deep in its own tradition to leave the stagnant pools of academia for the swifter, fresher currents of new thought. And even though I’d officially made the switch, my own thoughts were rather muddy. To once again paraphrase a Disney character:

Should I choose the smoothest course,

Steady as the sonnet’s beat?

Should I count the metric feet

And never wonder where they wend?

Or do you still wait for me, dream-giver

Just where all the pages end?

So I was sad and mopey and confused. And then one night, during a conversation with my “other mom” (Janie) I was reminded of a story:

Back when I was doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, I came to a point in the story where a character was going to (metaphorically) push a big red button. And something big was going to happen. I had it all planned out in my head at the time (though I don’t remember it at all anymore). I described the metaphorical button, and then the character reached out to push it…

I typed the words “Nothing happened.” I then spent about five minutes staring in bewilderment at the black marks on the screen.

That wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all. In fact, those words threw my entire idea for the scene out the window. But a central tenet of NaNoWriMo is that you cannot edit as you go. So instead I forged bravely ahead with this new series of events. And wouldn’t you know it, but in the end, the story turned out way more interesting than I ever could have imagined.

I must have told this story dozens and dozens of times to fellow writers, but before this conversation with Janie, it had never before occurred to me to apply it to my own life. If that big red button had “English major” printed on it, and nothing happened with that, I’m going elsewhere and doing other stuff that I enjoy. As Janie said, I’ll get where I’m going by another route that is uniquely mine, and the results will be awesome.

So here’s to two years of studying the weirdness of human beings. Because the mind is nothing if not interesting, and I don’t anticipate getting bored of it anytime soon.

 

 

P.S. As for a new, not-cake-but-equally-delicious senior thesis, I’d been pondering the idea of doing research into body language and facial expressions, aspects of human behavior that I am keenly aware of and endlessly fascinated by. However, today in the discussion section for one of my courses, the TA introduced herself as a psych grad student and explained that her research primarily focused on fiction and stories and why we care so much about events/people that are made up. Listening to her speak, I’m guessing I basically looked like this: