The side effects of studying psychology!

Ever since I became a psych grad student, I think several times before I write anything. I guess this is because I have begun to look at statistical significance of everything I wish to write about. After spending close to a semester reading articles on various topics in psychology, now, when I look through archives of my old blog posts, I feel that I have just made some claims in my posts merely based on my past experiences. However a psychologist would look at my posts and say that my claims are probably not generalizable to a larger population and that my sample size is too small, considering that my sample includes just me. Now when I think of writing about anything, I start to think if I have data to back up what I say. The results of this post indicate that this is a side effect of studying psychology. Future research in this regard should focus on keeping a personal blog and scientific research separate. In essence the abstract of this post is just that studying psychology has some serious side effects including appearing weird and crazy, thinking several times before writing or saying anything, getting excited for awkward things, questioning anything and everything! 

Memories and Experience

Our memories can ruin our experience or make them better. Inspired by Kahneman's TED talk which I heard a year and a half back and again couple of days back, I can say, I have so many examples in my life where my experience of an event has been completely ruined by my memories. As Kahneman points out - the experiencing self and the remembering self are two different ways we may be thinking of ourselves. The experiencing self is all about the present, the current experience which is going on, but the remembering self is how the mind forms memories about our current experience. What happens in present may feel great at the moment, but a little unpleasant memory of the current experience can ruin the entire experience when we recall it later. For instance, in psychology, when we do research work, we always have to take into account a possible limitation in experiments - the recall bias. The recall bias is when we ask participants of our research to recall an old incident. The remembering self is very much likely to affect the way they talk about the incident.

If we make conscious attempts to cut negative associations that the remembering self makes with an experience and make positive associations like remembering the better moments of an experience, our lives would be so much happier. I often hear from people about living this moment as is, enjoying each minute etc. Truth is, our experiencing self does this by itself anyways, but what we could play with is our remembering self. Why not give it a shot?

The Love Delusion!

What would you call falling in love with somebody - a delusion, illusion, hallucination, assumption or imagination? 

Just like the whole god delusion, I feel there is something called love delusion. If you really think about it, romantic love is everything mentioned above. Consider a one - sided love affair. At various points since meeting someone till you supposedly decide that these grapes are sour, I guess you go through phases of delusion, illusion, hallucination, assumption and imagination. 

The story begins with seeing someone and getting a liking for them for some god forsaken reason. Our minds are trained to be vulnerable to emotions for the most part. I would call this 'love at first sight' sort of thing as an illusion as, in most cases it really is an optical illusion and your eyes get tricked.  By some way we get to talk to them and then start the remaining tricky things. 

We begin assuming that they like us based on their responses and reactions to us and conveniently begin to overlook the possibilities that the other person is just being normal and being nice to you and is not necessarily into you. This is a classic example of what we call 'confirmation bias' in psychology. We create a mental hypothesis that we and the other person are actually in love and are going to end up together. We tend to seek out evidence to prove this hypothesis of ours, sometimes so much that we ignore that in actuality; there could be evidence to totally disprove our hypothesis. 

Then we go to the next step, where we start further fooling ourselves. We begin imagining the other person thinking about us or calling out to us or looking at us even when in reality they might not really be doing it with any particular romantic interest  in us. Who knows they might be staring at us, thinking how funny we look. From there we begin justifying every stupid thing that they do to fit our perceptions about their feelings for us. This leads to sweet hallucinations, where everything seems to be the best in the world, because we slowly begin to drift into a beautiful world which is full of love and happiness. 

Then comes the worst part, the love delusion. We begin to totally believe that the other person is into us and loves us and would do everything to be with us. The whole justifying every action of theirs goes higher and higher. We now have a firm belief that the other person is in love with us and that's when we begin to look to refute any evidence which others point out to us, or we ourselves subconsciously begin to note that probably is disproving our hypothesis i.e. which nicely shows us that the other person is not really into us. This is what is called 'disconfirmation bias' in psychology, wherein our outlooks are based more on our beliefs than actual data. Having gone through all this, one fine day, we wake up to harsh reality that our hypothesis was completely wrong and that everything was just a mirage and nothing even close to reality. This happens both when we assume that the other person likes us and also when we allow the other person to exploit us and fool us with false indications. 

I can't help saying that in most cases, unless it happens mutually, the whole vague concept of love is nothing but something misleading and does more bad than good. As much as it is advised to use intuition as compared to scientific methods to find out if a person is into you, or is cheating on you or whatever; sometimes, it is not foolish to consider data being easily available to decide. Though you do need to strike a firm balance between both. Paradoxically, love just 'happens'. But if it is not mutual, it just nicely 'breaks'. I am the last person who should talking about this, but then as much as our reality is distorted by our idealism, imagination and perception, at the end reality is what really matters.

Don't you forget about me!

I still am in my creative void phase, but nevertheless here is a song which has always touched my heart. I love Enrique.


They say love is just a game
They say time can heal the pain
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
And I guess I?m just a fool, I keep holding on to you


I told you once you were the one
You know that I?d die for you
Although it hurts to see you go
Oh, this time you should know, I won't try to stop you


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?


So you try to fake a smile
You don?t wanna break my heart
I can see that you're afraid
[- From :http://www.elyrics.net/read/e/enrique-iglesias-lyrics/don_t-you-forget-about-me-lyrics.html -]
But baby it?s to late, ?coz I?m already dying


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?
Why did I let you go?


Don?t you forget about me, baby
No, don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?
Why did I let you go?


Wherever I go, I won?t forget about you, no, no, no
Wherever you go, don?t you forget about me

Girl, are you old enough to get married?

          I happened to see a really old friend of mine. Well technically this girl is like 4 years younger to me. So she must be what around 21-22 now. I was shocked to learn last year that she had gotten married, because left to me, I would call it a child marriage. ha... This year I am even more shocked to learn that she is expecting soon. I don't know why but I am still shocked and not able to go meet her in person, partly because I might laugh at her and partly because who knows she might laugh at me. In India there is this whole stigma about age of marriage. I do know it is getting better nowadays. But I have to mention the changes are not way too much to get excited about. That said, some people in India typically very old people tell me that I am going to be 27 and that I am getting late by each my moment in getting married. Personally if you ask me, I would say that is pretty much BS. But respecting what elders say, I just asked some of these people who mentioned about age as to what do they think the right age for marriage for a girl should be. And they tell me, 24ish. What came out of my mouth right away was, how can you ruin some precious years of life in marriage so soon. :P. Not sure if I was right or wrong, but I said it nevertheless. Part of the reason why they were mentioning this age was that they really thought that it is an ideal age and also partly because they wanted to convince me saying that I am already late. Either way, I am not completely convinced. If you tell me that for health reasons a girl should try to get married pretty much by her early 30's it would make a little sense. Though if you see females in the US for example, so many get married much later. 

          All this said, the thought about this girl came back to my mind. She probably just finished a 3 year Bachelor's degree and right away got married as soon her final exams were done. I was surprised to learn about several other girls, including couple of own cousins think the same way, even though their parents are very well educated. But from parents' side they think they have to get over with their responsibility of getting their daughter married, because their idea of settling down is getting married, which I am not completely blaming. From the daughters' side, some of them like the ones I mentioned above typically have their mind set for marriage right after they are done with a basic Bachelors degree. Some of these girls would have even completed their Engineering and might still think the same. I would not be too surprised if these girls supposedly fell in love with a great guy and got married. But most of these get married to some guy through an arranged marriage, some guy who is most likely to be atleast 4-5 years elder to them. These girls are more than happy to get married and be home or just go work in some company. I think it is their idea of settling down in life. Again, I am no one to blame them or appreciate them. There is also another extreme of girls in India. Girls who raise their expectations about marriage and guys really high and keep pushing their marriage talks away and care more about their career, which again I think is fair enough. Again I am no one to blame or appreciate them. 

          In an ideal scenario, we would be allowed to date and find our right guy and we could get married whenever we want to. But of course, considering that this is India, for the most part this may or may not be possible. I don't want to really talk about moving in together etc here because this post is more about age of marriage for women than anything else. In my personal opinion, if you would let me decide, which in my case, I do get to decide, more than age, I believe a goodness of fit between me and my potential partner matters more than my age when I would get married. But also contradicting my own statement, I am giving a shot to all this marriage stuff only for a while. After which I would completely focus on what I wish to do than on marriage, mostly because even otherwise, marriage has never been a top priority for me. Either ways, in general as well, if one is not convinced that their marriage would be a happy extension of their life, and that it would be able to accommodate most of their aspirations with some adjustments here and there; getting married would be utterly foolish. Most of all, a girl who is not financially independent or not educated enough to be financially independent should think twice before getting married. It is totally upto an individual to decide on all this. Yet, the idea is to not regret later in life that you just got married, had kids and raised them and lived a very usual and kind of boring life where you didn't really achieve much (though some women would claim that they success in getting married, raising kids and making them successful). I do agree there are always tradeoffs when it comes to goals and marriage life. Having goals and trying to see if marriage would support or affect them, is one thing, but not having a goal at all, except the goal of living a very ordinary life ( I mean an ordinary life in my opinion, where you depend on your husband for each and everything) is in my honest opinion pretty stupid. All said, marriage is a big risk anyways, why not take the risk carefully. 

Counseling centers in colleges in India

The term counseling is often very confusing. It majorly is a guidance to cope up with a situation or to make choices, an advice system which could help you make decisions or take a certain course of action. So I was reading in a local newspaper about the attempts to set up counseling centers, in Indian universities.According the universities in India, the whole point of doing this is the typical reason for helping out college students deal with their transition from high school to college and to help them deal with various kinds of stresses that they could face.

I completely agree with setting up counseling centers in universities. But in a country like India, counseling, depression, therapy and even psychology are all seen more as a social stigma than as something helpful. That said, anyone going for therapy or taking something as much as an anti depressant is looked upon with eyes of pity, or eyes of curiosity about their inability to handle their problems. As long as there is going to be this sort of social stigma, chances of children coming forward with their problems to the counselors are going to be really sleek. Several people cope with their issues and come out strong after struggles, but the whole awareness of setting up counseling centers has come about after college students have committed suicides.

Let me give a simple example. Again, this is purely based on my understanding. When Indian parents do eventually take a step of sending their kid to a shrink, they have all sorts of anxieties and apprehensions. Firstly they want an objective answer as to how long a therapy would continue. They are of the constant fear that a simple counseling and therapy could become a big problem in the future. Part of the fear is about any occurrence of future psychological issues, but the bigger part of the fear is concerned with the social stamping their kid might get on them, which could hinder relationships like marriages etc in the future. Note that there is a difference between a psychological fear and a social fear here.

All this said, setting up of counseling centers in Indian universities is definitely a positive step, but how effective it would be is still is big unanswered question. People need to be made aware that a therapy or medications for psychological disorders and several of the psychological disorders themselves are not really a social stigma, but are just like other genuine issues which could be solved. As long as psychological problems are seen as social disgrace, or as hardcore mental health issues, psychological treatments or counseling centers etc are going to be difficult to be made useful for people.

Somewhere I belong!

          Feeling of belonging is a very important concept. Consider being in a relationship, where you feel like an alien most of the time or working a job which makes you feel all the time that it is just not what you want to do or, living in a place where you feel you are a stranger and are hardly able to relate yourself with anyone or anything there. These were a few examples of what I feel are the feeling of 'not belonging'. Some associated concepts are cultural shock, which is essentially a feeling of not belonging to a certain culture and place; identity crisis which is essentially a feeling of not belonging anywhere in life among peers, among elders etc etc.

          It is convenient to say that all this lies in our mind. If you were a proponent of humanistic psychology, you would notice Maslow's theory of Needs (Please use google to study the theory :P), which specifies as one of the needs - the feeling of belonging and acceptance, love etc. Feeling of belonging is a very fundamental need at various stages of life and not just during childhood and young adulthood. In my opinion there is a paradox here. At first you don't have a feeling of belonging and you tend to be on the quest for somewhere to belong and try to reach out to sources which offered you sense of belonging atleast during childhood. On the contrary, there are people who just adapt themselves to situations and bring in a sense of belonging for themselves, which can probably be summed up as being a Roman in Rome. As we have evolved as humans, we have adapted ourselves to the environment and learnt to improve our lives. Even though it is hard to say how the need for belonging was fulfilled, in my opinion the need for belonging was superimposed by a more important need which was of mere survival.

          For me a sense of belonging is extremely important. The point I am trying to make here is that at any point, implicitly or explicitly a feeling of belonging is inevitable. If you are trying to connect with people on very professional level, sometimes you do that only for the sake of getting your work done or for so-called networking. But even then, your comfort level with people increases when there is a mutual effort to make conversations slightly on a personal level of course within certain bounds. As an example, in my opinion when you address people with their names more often during conversations, it makes the other person more comfortable. Similarly on a personal level, when a person individually tries to adapt to the society, the culture, the place he lives in, the people around him, a sense of belonging becomes a supreme need, the lack of which affects the day to day life of the person.

          Overall, summing the whole thing up, there is a quest in people to find out where they belong, until which nothing really makes them feel satisfied in life. As for me, I am still searching where I really belong and hoping that there is somewhere I do belong and that I would find it soon.