Hangin' out with the smart kids

I knew leaving my colleagues far behind and trying to write a dissertation from afar would be a challenge. But I thought it would be a challenge to stay focused, not that it might make me stupider.

Well, not really more stupid, but less articulate at least. I've been listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, in which he proposes that split-second decisions can be the most accurate. He calls this rapid cognition and it results from something he calls the thin-slicing of experience. The reason thin-slicing and gut instinct can yield some of the most accurate information on which to base decisions is because they are processed subconsciously. For example, he found that gamblers playing a rigged game responded physiologically to the rig (sweaty palms, indicating increased stress) before they consciously figured out that the game was rigged.

This subconscious attention to the world also affects our interaction with it. In an experiment, researchers gave two groups of people 30 trivial pursuit questions to answer. Just before they were to answer the questions, the first group was told to think about what it would be like to work as a professor, while the second group were told to think about soccer hooligans.

Just thinking about intelligence (presumably a requisite to being a professor) yielded 55.6% correct answers in the first group, while thinking about a lack of intelligence (again, presumably a requisite for being a soccer hooligan) yielded correct answers only 42.6% of the time. Wow.

It wasn't just intelligence either. Test subjects given a linguistic test that included a high number of words having to do with aging walked slower after exiting the test room, and those with words about rudeness and agression were ruder to the examiner upon leaving.

So... maybe it would be of benefit to hang out with smart people... to think of myself as one of them... to admire how smart they really are.

Certainly couldn't hurt.

But I've left my academic community far behind, and try as I might, I don't belong to the ones here.

Might have more of a negative impact than I originally thought...