h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My parents graduated from USC so I have loved UCLA since coach Wooden worked the boards at Pauley. I am a student at Willamette Unversity in history (senior). I've studied cognitive science recently and so I'm a little acquainted with some of the issue you deal with. My own paper was about dissociative behavior and juggling! No great conclusions but found that jugglers need to dissociate when they juggle more than about five balls. They need to re-train their focus into a bigger space than ordinary people, they cannot focus on each ball but "unfocus" and "see" all the balls even though it is really is impossible. It puts their brain into a special state.

I know it's not animal studies but ...

I grew up in the Orange county area and I am famiiar with Westwood as I early on, thought I would go to UCLA. (OH well) I really like a small liberal arts school and I really like a small (140,000) city. The entertainment is not as good but the green of the trees and the clear water streams balances it way off the scale. There is no breaks in the city from Sylmar to San Diego (with the exception of the Marine Camp. That's not for me.

The notion that jugglers must "dissociate" (not sure exactly what you mean by that) from the individual balls when juggling more than 5 sounds a lot like the experience expert chess players have of seeing "forces of movement" instead of individual pieces when they look at the chess board (I learned this during a presentation by Eliot Hearst, an emminant psychologist and excellent chess player - he used to watch Bobby Fischer play on the park tables in NYC).

I have a friend from the East coast who is a graduate student at UC Irvine. He says he really doesn't like Orange County, but loves LA. I haven't spent any time in Oragne county, except to drive through it to get to San Diego, but I do agree with him about LA. I would prefer a more balanced place in terms of trees and fresh streams and pools of water, but I would have to give up my position at UCLA to attain that...and I ain't about to do that!

I've only been to Washington state once, on a conference trip to Seatle. It was sunny and 70 the entire time and I fell in love with the place!

Thankfully, I love LA, too.

I originally left Southern California in July of 1991 and have never considered moving back since. Of course I have lived in 5 states now, but I love the pacific Northwest. If you should ever consider taking a full professorship checkout Willamette University, we have undergraduate classes of 10 to 20, a beautiful (but small campus) and a large endowment. Willamette is also rated in the top 100 (academically) schools in America and it was the first college to open in the West 1842. We're still in the area of the Pac 10 so we still see all the games, of course the University of Oregon Ducks are to the South but we tend to ignore them.

We are near the big city of Portland (one hour away) about 1.2million but far enough away that we can smell the trees and put our feet in the streams. There is the mill stream that actually flows through the campus year round!

Dissociative states are a well known phenomenon noticed with EEG, it was first found in diseased brains but there is growing research into normal people using them for various situations. The classical cases though lead to deep meditative states, or trance states. I just happen to juggle and noticed what I thought might be a connection with them. There is much yet to be discovered about these states. I dont think animals have dissociative states but I just don't know.

Willamette sounds like a nice school. Do they have a graduate program in psychology? The nice thing about UCLA is that it is one of the top research psychology departments in the world. I only have to teach one class per quarter which allows me to be very productive in my research. And there are many colleagues to interact, and even collaborate with, many of them considered the top researchers in their respective fields. It is a thriving science hot spot, and being a part of it is energizing and intellectually stimulating.

However, most Tier 1 research universities tend to be in urban areas, so if we scientists have to resign ourselves to city life. Fortunately, I like many aspects of living in a city, though the drawback is a much more limited access to rural life. Vacations in the nearby mountains can be very refreshing, though. My wife and I discovered the Lake Arrowhead area (near Big Bear) and love it!

no unfortuntely the only graduate schools are a law school and a school of business. But there is a lot of teaching that goes on here. I can certainly understand you wanting to continue your research, but there is no graduate level psychology at all.

Have you published yet? Even though I'm just a student I'm well aware of the requirement to publish (or perish) in the world of academia. What is there about pigeons and rats that you look to for insight inot how humans operate? What paradigm are you testing?

Yeah I know about trade offs in career fields. I just feel that somehow for me at least, taking care of my sprit is more important than meeting the ultimate in my field. As an electronic technician I worked on such things as the Space shuttle project with Rockwell Int'l and the GPS, while I lived in Anaheim. The best housing I could afford was an apartment in a slum. Certainly not have a family also. I have done the work with some of the world's best companies and found that it wasn't worth it.

I did go through many years of questioning before I made up my mind. UCLA is a great place don't get me wrong. I am not a recruiter for Willamette University and I dont get anything for convincing you to come, frankly I dont even know if there is a staff position here that is open but your page seemed to indicate that LA created some issues for you. I am aware of the closed tunnel that academia can put someone into and I thought I would throw you a rope to see something else.

Yeah I've been to Big Bear with its brown trees and water that isn't fit to drink (well maybe) at least it is away from the city to get some thinking time.

I think I was being a bit false when I complained about the smog and commutes in LA. Actually, the westside has pretty good air quality and I currently live in an apartment walking distance from campus, so my commute is quite pleasant. I'm actually very happy in LA and have no intention of leaving.

I've published a fair bit over the past 8 years. I actually enjoy publishing and am in no danger of perishing. (Most of my published papers are online at my website: pigeonrat.psych.ucla.edu.) And I'm not using rats and pigeons to gain insight into how humans work, per se. I'm currious about animals and how they work behaviorally. Obviously humans are one species of animal, so I'm interested in them, too, but no more or less so than other animals. In fact, part of my interest is in comparative psychology which investigates similarities and differences in behavioral processes across different animal taxa. If you're interested, my website also has powerpoint lecture files for the comparative psychology class I taught at UCLA last Spring.

Most of my work involves Pavlovian or instrumental procedures to investigate "cognitive" mechanisms that underlie animal behavior, such as learning, memory, perception, and cognition. Some of the research projects I'm working on currently include studying the mechanisms of extinction of Pavlovian conditioned responding, the associative structure of forward vs. backward conditioning (e.g., tone-->food vs food-->tone), the nature of information processes that operate when multiple predictors compete for control of a conditioned response, and the associative processes responsible for constructing temporal and spatial maps between external events.

Ciao

What do you mean, that jugglers aren't part of animal studies?

Well it seems that you have found yourself a good niche and I'll bet you'll do well. I may even check out your published material.

My parents briefly lived in Marina Del Rey and they got that sea breeze also. I still remember when UCLA was ranked higher on the sporting field in football, basketball and even gymnastics (now the men's gymnastics is gone the way of all title IX sports for men. Now the Duck of OU are the winners in the PAC 10.

I'll be around.