On the road at last - MAPP at UEL

After 33 years outside the formal education system, I stepped back in again last Friday with the first weekend of my two-year part-time MSc in Applied Positive Psychology.

Impressions as they come ....

An extraordinary range of nationalities on the course - I counted 18: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania,Taiwan, Thailand, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA - with Brits of Welsh, Bangladeshi and Punjabi origin.

Meeting somebody on the course who lives just a mile from me in Bradford-on-Avon.

The vim, vigour and passion of Dr Kate Hefferon.

Three excellent graduands who shared some of their insights to help us on their way - Vera, Chris and Darren.

A fascinating talk on stress by Professor Angela Clow from the University of Westminster.

A very handy stats and research primer from Dr Joan Painter.

A spectacular late entrance to a lecture by Hanna with Victor and Manus in tow.

The surprising and welcome discovery that PP is interested in moral considerations.

Great chats with Ed, Mega, Dave, Denis, Hanna, Ruo Lin, Lindsay and Francesca, to name but a few.

Now down to the reading.

The limits of empathy and responsibility for others

I've been doing a lot of reading and investigation in preparation for my (fingers crossed) MSc course at UEL starting September - reflecting on a number of topics such as the common good and moral reasoning.

Here's one that bugs me: What is my circle of empathy, and how does this overlap with my circle of responsibility?

As a bloke who aspires to be a mature adult, I take responsibility for myself of course - my actions, my health, the things I say and write etc. I take responsibility for my family, to ensure they are provided for and feel loved and encouraged but not overindulged. I take responsibility for the fact that I'll screw up with the family and sometimes it will because I do the wrong thing even knowing deep down it's wrong (e.g. being sarcastic).

I'm a bit responsible for my street and for the various groups I belong to, and for doing a good job for my clients and for paying my taxes and all that.

And I have empathy - I feel for - all sorts of random people, such as the Nurse Practitioner who watched over me and chatted with me after my day surgery yesterday. The circle of empathy reaches all over the place, and even back in time. It's unpredictable, which I guess is the nature of feelings.

However, when I go beyond people with whom I have some personal contact or mediated contact (e.g. songs, news articles etc.) I don't feel much empathy and very little real sense of responsibility.

In fact I read recently (can't find the reference) that with charities, people tend to donate more if the focus of the request for a donations is on one person rather than on two - that empathy and giving decrease when communication focuses on deserving groups or whole societies.

This maybe throws some light on my feeling of rebellion that I should feel or have any responsibility for every single person born. There are almost seven billion humans and another couple of hundred have been born since I started writing this.

How could I possibly pretend to have any responsibility for, and anything but the vaguest passing empathy, with such huge numbers of people?

Get physical, get rhythmic

As part of my route towards the PhD I'm applying to do an MSC in Applied Positive Psychology - not about positive thinking per se, but rather an approach to pscyhology that's not based on the disease model. Within that, what I want to focus on is the role of time-critical activities in fostering health and well-being.

It's my belief and experience that "being in your head" alone is an unhealthy and unhappy place. To live well, in the broadest sense of the words, we need to use as much of our body as circumstances allow, and to engage regularly in activities that require coordination and timing. For people of limited mobility this might be as simple as tapping hands or pencils to the rhythm of a piece of music or poetry - rhythmic movements (who's chortling back there?) are very important, so dancing, walking, cycling, running, swimming are all recommended.

For people with intellectual strengths there's an additional pay-off. Engaging in the sort of activities I mention is a pleasure in itself and I'm sure trips cascades of beneficial effects at every level, from the cellular, neurological and biochemical all the way up to the emotional, psychological and spiritual.

It also provides a lot of food for thought and reflection.  What's not to like?

Go multidisciplinary PhD, young man!

About a month ago I started consulting a brilliant woman about refining my PhD research thinking.  She has come through the hard way, with a doctorate in the medical field, and pretty quickly concluded that I was at the inductive/expansive/complexity/holistic/integrative end of the scientific research conundrum and should be looking to do something across disciplines.

Yes indeed.

She also quickly concluded that my original research idea wasn't well-formed. Fair point.

So it's back to the drawing board.  Better to start of as right as possible than to get half-way through and find out it's wrong-headed.

Why a PhD is like a fractal - sort of

Thanks to a steer from Ellis Pratt I had a very informative conversation with Chris Atherton of the University of Central Lancashire - just what I needed.

Once I had outlined my putative PhD research proposal to her, she patiently and gently commented that as is so often the case, it was actually several projects.  We then went through it, peering into the constituent parts. 


Maybe this is one essential difference between post-grad academic work on a subject and work in the commercial sphere.  The commercial requirement is for a broad, eye-catching idea with lots of impressionist pieces to illustrate it.  The data has to be good enough to pass muster and build into an overall plausible proof of the starting hypothesis.  The academic work requires peering more deeply into single topic, defining the subject of investigation ever more tightly to and getting the best-possible data to get a provable representation of what's happening.

In praise of Professor Richard Ivry and iTunesU

iTunes has a very handy category of content called iTunesU where I found a series of Cognitive Neuroscience lectures by Professor Richard Ivry of UCB, aka University of California at Berkeley.

Not only is the content of the lectures very interesting and useful, but Rich Ivry's delivery is priceless.  It's a real incentive to listen back not only for the content, but also to get the nuances of his phrasing and rhythm and choice of words. You can hear one of the lectures with the slides here

I find myself repeating phrases back to see if I can get them just right, which I guess is a handy way of getting students to learn the materials.  Or maybe it's just me.

Narrowing down the field - it's a start

I know what I want to study and research, but it's taken a while to find out exactly what it's called.  There are a lot of disciplines and pseudo-disciplines that feature the word "neuro" in their name.  Anyway, the field I'm focusing glories in the handle "cognitive neuroscience".  It probably sounds like gobbledegook for most people but for me it's full of promise.

"Cognitive Neuroscience--With its concern about perception, action, memory, language and selective attention---will increasingly come to represent the central focus of all Neurosciences in the 21st century."

Now that's what I call right up my street. Let me at it!. 

"You don't wanna do that, mate"

Last Friday at my wife's graduation ball I was chatting with Marianna, one of her fellow GEPs (Graduate Entry Programme) - intense, off-the-scale brilliant with a degree in Chemistry from MIT and chosen to compete for the medicine Gold Medal in London this year.  She asked about my plans, I told her about my thinking on the PhD research project and she practically whooped on the spot.  She picked up the idea and ran with it.  Very energizing.

The following day I was at a BBQ and found myself in conversation with a guy who turned out to be a retired consultant psychiatrist.  He too asked about my plans, so I told him.   The response was very different.  If he had been a less elevated professional, he would have sucked through his teeth, shaken his head and said, "you don't wanna do that, mate."  As it was, he tilted his head back, raised his eyebrows and said "you'll have quite a lot of reading to do....."  I found his response quite discouraging at first.  Then talking further, I was surprised to find out that he didn't know the difference between PET scanning and fMRI scanning, two techniques for mapping brain activity. I came to the conclusion that either he was way behind the curve or else his area of speciality was different from what I'm looking at.

So far I've had four types of response to my idea.
1."What?"- (meaning "I don't understand and I'm not interested in understanding"
2. "Sounds interesting" - meaning "let's talk about something else"
3. "You'll have to do XX and have you read YYY?" - meaning "I already know loads about this subject"
4. "Wow - so you could do this thing and maybe that thing and how will you approach ZZZ?" - meaning "I understand and I'm interested"

How much am I thinking of biting off?

The University of Bath has an all-online system for making an application, and a very friendly IT guy to sort out any glitches.

The system asks for an academic reference and copies of degree and degree transcript.  I rang up Bath and pointed out that I graduated in 1978, so most of my tutors at Bristol would be long since retired or passed on.  The admissions people were helpful and amused and said it was okay, I just needed a solid client reference or two. 

Pim has the advantage of being a doctor and a company director, so that makes him a doubly handy referee.  He argued a bit and said I already know plenty and don't need to spend a lot of time and effort learning more unless it's for fun.  So I assured him it will be fun (??) and he said okay, he would provide a reference.

Then I rang up the University of Bristol for copies of my paperwork.  They arrived the next day - very fast indeed.

Now I "just" have to write the research proposal.   The admissions lady said some people write 100 pages!!  I was thinking more in terms of 2-3 pages.  After all, when I outlined the idea to my contact person in the psychology department I took 10 minutes at most and he said it was thorough and elegant.

I really have no idea how much I am proposing to take on here in terms of scope and time.  However, it doesn't really matter because 1) I'm a volunteer - what I do or don't do is up to me, 2) whether or not I complete it, I will learn an awful lot of useful stuff along the way, 3) it will build up my knowledge in things that interest me personally and professionally and 4) I am confident that I can shape things creatively as I go.

Encouragement, of a sort

A long and interest call yesterday with my brilliant friend Bruce Clark, a senior journalist at The Economist and man of prodigious intelligence.

I mentioned my PhD plans to him and after a little discussion, he said that he tended to be wary of people in their late middle age deciding to do a PhD.  He gave me an example of one project he felt sure was doomed to flounder, and then with his customary courtesy he assured me that he thought mine was a different type of PhD project.  I certainly think it is, because it's practical, research-based and pretty concrete.

Talking with my piano teacher Sophie Yates about it today, her first response was a wholehearted "that's very interesting".

For me at this point the issues are less about whether the project is of any practical value and application - it certainly would be - but rather about how much I can muster and master the necessary knowledge to pull it all together coherently.