Cerebral Vasoconstriction, aka I’m not crazy, I’ve been tested; aka only Freud thinks naughty things about balloon animals

Yes, the Blogosphere is well overdue for the madness to follow! I was originally going to say “major”, but this almost certainly isn’t exclusive to undergrads; emphasis on the “almost”, as there is really no such thing as 100% certainty. Even Richard Dawkins would agree. ;)

[For those who are open-minded and still willing to be confronted with some support for the claim I’m not (or, at least, was not predestined to be at birth) crazy/delusional/Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D, see also: “Psychology Makes You Crazy.”]

 

You Know You’re a Psychology Student When…

1. You have created something with a title such as “Cerebral Vasoconstriction” – though this is probably also applicable to biology, health sciences, and/or medical students.
2. When arguing with someone, you point out their subconscious defense mechanisms in an effort to discredit their argument(s) (or piss them off), just to be an asshole.
3. When arguing with someone, you point out their logical, cognitive, formal, informal, etc. fallacies in an effort to discredit their argument(s) (or piss them off), just to be an asshole.
4. If people ask what you’re studying and you tell them, they ask if you’re trying to read their minds; they may even give you a look, kind of like they might look if they were asking Miss Cleo or one of those girls in Girl Interrupted, if she reads minds.
5. Usually, you’re psychoanalyzing yourself, not reading other people’s minds. Or at least, you’re trying to psychoanalyze other people much less often.
6. You are aware that the scenario in #5 is arguably as much an indication of paranoia as that in #4.
7. You like to read/learn about things like bizarre sexual fetishes, Hellraiser-esque torture chambers, or what goes on in the brain during an acid trip, because it makes you feel more sane and normal.
8. You aren’t sure whether it’s better to argue for a ‘hard’ or a ‘soft’ science.
9. You anticipate that the moment people hear or see words such as “hard” or “soft”, they are very likely to either start snickering or make some type of dick joke out of it. At which point you aren’t sure where to go with the conversation topic.
10. You wonder whether your acknowledging such possibilities as the one in #9 says something about your subconscious’ secret taboo relationship with penises.
11. You wonder whether your subconscious was more attuned to “soft” or “hard”, because that may hint at something.
12. You wonder why you are still thinking about penises; this seems to make the entire thought process thus far a pointless waste of time.
13. You wonder if, when you tell people introverts are introverts, because their minds are more interesting than what is going on in their external world,  that this was an effort on the part of your subconscious to free itself from its repressed ability to express phallic-themed thoughts.
14. You use abbreviations like “i.e.”, “e.g.”, and “et al.”, in the majority of (at the least) your academic writing (but probably also your written communication in general.)
15. You have had at least one professor who used at least one of the above abbreviations verbally in lecture.
16. In colloquial/casual contexts, you omit the comma following one of the above abbreviations, so that you don’t look as nerdy as you would if you always used the comma.
17. You actually know the difference between the meanings of “i.e.” and “e.g.”
18. You start noticing professors’ lecture slides are APA-formatted, and then lose focus on the actual lecture and start wondering if that’s mandatory, or if it was a cover-your-ass-type thing, because they don’t want the IRB or some other ethical board on their ass for plagiarism of lecture material. Then you start thinking what a pain in the ass it must be to have to not only make all those lecture slides, but also APA-format them. And you wonder how they can possibly remember all those rules. And how many tries you think it’ll take before you stop fucking up the formatting on your hypothetical slides at sometime in the hypothetical future…then you stuff your feelings of quickly surfacing fear that won’t stop haunting you.. “Who ever said you have a future?” Then you realize you just missed a shitload of lecture notes.
19. You wonder if there is any explanation as to why you would use the word “ass” three times in one list item, other than possibly some subconscious repressed thought screaming to get out, and take all the penis-filled thoughts with it.
20. You then start wondering if you only started wondering this so that your mind can rationalize the images of anal sex that would follow.
21. You eventually realize that trying to analyze yourself on the most superficially rational level, is not going to inform you of whether or not your subconscious secretly wants to fuck men, any more than staring at the cover of Maxim would inform you of the same.
22. You explain your own thoughts/internal processes in structural and visual terms, such as “superficially rational” to represent the outermost parts of the cortex.
23. You wonder whether being very visual is a sign something is wrong with you.
24. You wonder whether you’ve already gone far beyond simply, “Psychology Makes You Crazy.”
25. It is not uncommon for you to be awake at times like 12:30AM, doing things like writing a blog entry in which you list relatively ubiquitous, yet idiosyncratic scenarios that are characteristic of psychology students (which may or may not contradict a previous claim regarding self-analysis vs. that of others..?)
26. You start to question yourself on moral principle, after someone gets weirded out when they find out you fairly confidently had long presumed something about them, that they never actually told you; or, when you somehow were able to manipulate someone (usually in a verbal manner) to get them to say something they hadn’t anticipated – nor hoped – to mention… by which point you pretty  much nod along when they call you an asshole.
27. You understand certain women better than they can understand themselves…and you know that “certain women” essentially means (to all the “other” women as well as to men) “the ones you don’t want to engage in any social interaction with”, (and sadly, that many men don’t know essentially means “the ones you don’t want to engage in any sexual relations with.”)
28. You love disturbing psychological thrillers – the more fucked up, the better (though not in a freaky sex fetish way…just speaking for myself here…) [Note: See #7.]
29. If you’ve ever dipped into the world of Evo-Psych… you’ve had to put up with political extremists who either start violating your personal space to rant at you about how you sound like a Social Darwinian Marxist; or those who do the same but accuse you of pushing a right-wing agenda: Both are equally plausible statements: Marxism was an ideology heavy on the cleansing of the genetically unfit, justified in the name of Darwinian theories of natural selection; and the right-wing agenda, it goes without mentioning, has always exploited evolutionary theory as its sturdy backbone.
30. You actually understood all the sarcasm above (or other things like it.)
31. People seem slightly surprised when it occurs to them you are the one telling them that most of Freudian psychoanalytic theory is a bunch of quasi-pseudo-scientific-wishy-washy-hoo-ha.
32. You don’t analyze your own thought process to death when you use terminologies such as “hoo-ha”, the way you do with terms like “ass”, “hard”, “soft”, and “phallic-themed.”
33. There’s always about 1000 people nearby who are drunker than you on the average college campus, but you are almost always the one most likely to be talking about illicit substances.
34. You’re wondering why a list like this one hasn’t already been made – or you’re assuming that’s impossible, and you just must not have found it (them?) yet.
35. XtraNormal is a type of cartoon entertainment.
36. You mentally pick apart song lyrics when you listen to music, and/or mentally pick apart the artist, often based upon the song lyrics or overall content.
37. You have ever wondered why some musical artists are notorious for excessive, liberal use of profanity, while others of the exact same genre are not.
38. You wonder if all the scientific/social scientific studies ever published making the claim men on average have a higher libido than women, are some sort of female vendetta-conspiracy against men, in light of the fact almost every female rock musician seems to carry the libido of about a half dozen men… though drawing such conclusions solely based on the nature and content of artists’ creative works is hardly conclusive evidence. ;)
39. In non-academic contexts, you have actually used phrases such as “drawing such conclusions…” and “..hardly conclusive evidence”, and you weren’t actually trying to be a smartass.
40. For at least a fraction of a second, the thought occurred to you that it would be funny to create DSM criteria for this list, and state a minimum number of items must be true of the reader to reach criteria for being a psych. student. Then you felt that choosing such a number would be largely arbitrary, unempirical, and wrongly assign to a bunch of people a label that they probably don’t want, or that will become a large goldmine of unjustified social stigmatization.
41. You have attempted to analyze a dream you had, and by the time you get through most of the first main part of it, you’ve forgotten the entire second half of the dream.
42. You wonder if obtaining, retaining, and simply having possession of large amounts of factual information on the topic of sleep, REM cycles, and human dreaming, but yet apparently having a memory lapse when you try to actually apply any of this knowledge, makes you in some way a hypocrite.
43. You want to know if a personal preference for brunettes is somehow a negative indicator of personal  health or “reproductive fitness”, in light of the findings about blonde hair, a youthful appearance, fertility, and the tendency for people to pair-bond based on social rank/approval.'
44. You’re not sure why it matters when you don’t really like kids anyway, so you don’t really want any.
45. You’re once again curious about the irony of the frequency at which you hear about unplanned pregnancies and teen parents, vs. that about long-married couples in their 30s-50s who both appear to some degree, to be virtually infertile.
46. …as well as the irony of the trend towards higher birth rates in lower IQ individuals, coupled with the mysterious generational, consistent increase in average IQ.
47. You’re not opposed to using stereotypes in colloquial conversation, because you know at least a few of them that actually have empirical support.
48. You want to know why “sleep experts” keep reiterating the same bullshit line about insomnia, that they call a “tip”, to reserve the bed only for sleep and for sex; there don’t appear to be very many people today in the modern West who would outwardly refute classical and operant conditioning theory, so these much be the world’s most ignorant experts. That is at least more likely than militant conditioning-theory-deniers, Everyone knows that given the scenario bed = conditioned stimulus, getting into bed to go to sleep = unconditioned stimulus, you will end up with horniness = conditioned response. Or, in other words, every time you go to bed with the intention of sleeping, you’d end up having trouble doing so until you find somebody to sleep with. Most likely a naked somebody.
49. If that last sentence somehow gave you more phallic-themed mental imagery, you’re probably all the way back up somewhere around…Item #11; if it did not, you’re probably not reading this, which means I am talking to myself, which means I seem to have completely different mental health concerns to address altogether.

Random awesomeness. From me, Honorary Founder of Awesome.