Fifty-Seventh Post
I am currently on a bus in Vermont heading to Montreal. Pretty neat, huh? I mean, not tweet worthy of course, but there is a pretty high standard to be upheld there.
Zing on Twitter? That’s right: no link from my blog – visited by literally ones of people – to you, Twitter.
Anyway, I’m on my way to the 30th annual conference for the Society of Behavioral Medicine to do a poster presentation. Way back in September, my coworker and I threw together an abstract over the course of a couple of very long nights, and it was pretty terrible. We certainly had no idea what we were doing, and our bosses were less than thrilled that we’d submitted something with their names on it before allowing them to review it (we literally submitted the abstract at the 11th hour). Also we had no results. Also I think my coworker was actually happy that I won the coin toss for whose name would appear as the lead author.
But a couple months later, I received an email from SBM telling me that the damn thing had been approved. Ha! They must’ve really needed some posters, because that abstract represented a pretty deep scraping of the barrel. Being a poster presentation, however, we had some flexibility in, well, doing whatever the hell we wanted, so we completely changed our hypotheses. Which got us nothing. But then we did some exploring and found some (sorta) interesting stuff! Turns out that firefighters depend more on their cohorts for maintenance of mental health after being in the fire service for a year (as opposed to their families when they start out). I mean, pretty much duh, but it’s nice to see common sensical things supported by data. Because then if you ever wanna say, “hey, speaking of social support, did you know that firefighters derive greater support from their colleagues than family,” (ya’know, when you’re grabbing drinks with friends on a Friday night) you can rest assured that your claim is grounded in science!
Can I just say that I can’t flipping wait until I get to do my own research? I don’t want to freak you guys out, but finding correlations between discrete measures is…pretty much the coolest ever. It’s one thing to assert something because it appears to be true, but it’s something else entirely to point to facts (or the closest thing to them) and know that your assertion is empirically supported. I’m vaguely considering going into clinical neuropsychology in order to bolster my chops as they related to how the mind and brain interact. Example: meditation can help you relax, but how exactly does it physiologically decrease activation of the hippocampus and amygdala? I’m assuming science has already answered this one, but this is along the lines of what I want to have the knowledge to explore. I’d like to get my correlations accurate down to the smallest units I can measure!
Boosh.