I might even start out with the cliche, “Once upon a time …”

Then I launch into the story. It’s not a science fiction story, and it requires you to engage no extraordinary belief systems. However the story isn’t exactly like daily life. We know this to be true due to the fact that if television were just like daily life, we wouldn’t watch. Thus, television must be more exciting than daily life.

Off of the top of my head, I’m thinking of an episode of Desperate Housewives that I saw somewhat recently. One of the characters killed a man in her living room, but there was soon — like very soon — to be a part in that living room.

They had to dispose of the body.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb and suppose that you’ve never found yourself in such a situation. Nor, I’m guessing, have any of your friends or family told you a similar story that actually happened to them.

So we’re in new territory here. We’re weaving a tale that is completely outside of your comfort zone and beyond your realm of personal knowledge.

Despite this foreignness, a decade of research in our lab shows that you can make snap-second judgments about the plausibility of events as they unfold.

If, for instance, we were to lean the body against the wall and put a lampshade on his head to pretend he is a lamp during the party, you would quite rightly say, “That would never happen!

My question is this: where does that come from? That is, how you decide what is implausible in the world of the unlikely?

Yet hundreds — perhaps more than 1,000 by now — of participants in our lab show that they make these decisions easily, quickly, and consistently.

The same is true to things highly likely to happen. That is, if the story were to have continued that the women stuffed the corpse into a spare bedroom, you likely would have surmised that this could have happened.

If either case, you would have made the decision quite quickly. Our data show, however, that you would have made the decision about the implausible even slightly more quickly.

For someone interested in the brain, however, this presents a challenge.

How did you actually make that decision?

From the standpoint of what’s in the brain, they are fundamentally different processes. We can argue that for the highly likely scenario, you can drawn upon actual experiences. That is, there are actually memories stored in the network of your brain that suggest that this could happen.

Yet for the implausible case, almost by definition, such memories cannot reside in the brain.

Yet you make the decision equally as quickly — perhaps even faster.

How?

We’ve tried many methods to infuse the decisions with cognitive roadblocks to make it more difficult, but precious little light has been shed.

These cognitive roadblocks can be thought of as slow-motion video, where we slow down the process to get a better look. Still no clear pattern emerges.

Even more interesting are the cases where the next event in the story might or might not happen. These do slow people down, but when we force them to decide under time pressure, they seem to be able to speed things up while coming to the same conclusion.

We are not totally lost here. We have some insight, yet these hypotheses become much more difficult to test. We’re lining up two new studies as we speak to delve once again into the process of reality in an attempt to force the brain to reveal its secrets.

I’ll keep you posted in this space. Experience tells me that we’ll learn a little bit while stumbling upon new questions that had not yet occurred.

The human mind remains the most complicated object in the known universe, and its recursive hold on my imagination is as firm as it ever was.

I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, on Jan. 2, 2002 to begin a joint doctoral program in Telecommunications and Cognitive Science.

Working with Annie remains one of the greta joys of my professional life.

Thankfully I save almost everything, so I have a record of our first e-mail exchange. I wrote at the end of my first year as a master’s student.

She wrote back the next morning, May 18, 2000, describing her program of research. In this e-mail she outlines what I have come to believe is the best way to run a lab:

I do think that the program here at Indiana is/can be very rigorous. In many ways our curriculum asks students to identify their interests and needs and goals and then design their own program, with the help of their committee, to get them there.  For this reason it can be as challenging as you want to make it!  The basic Ph.D. core is, I think, a solid group of courses.

Since you’ve read my work you probably already know that a lot of my work was/is done as a team effort – with graduate students. I expect my Ph.D. students to contribute to all aspects of the research done in the lab from data collection to analysis to coming up with ideas for future studies (not all of these at first but all of them by the end of your studies).

I like to think that my Ph.D. students, when they are done, are methodologically well trained, and theoretically proficient in the field in general – and then have their own specialties of which they know (I would hope) more than me.

It is always my hope that I will learn from my Ph.D. students, not just that they will learn from me.  I expect them to branch out, learn more, and share the knowledge they learn and use with the lab group (in lab meetings) and the field (in conference papers), etc.

…

My own work tends to travel across content types (political advertising, news, prime time TV, PSAs, etc.) and recently has been moving into other platforms from TV (audio only, computer display, video games, etc.)  However, my theoretical approach is consistent (limited capacity information processing approach) and my methodology is generally experimental with an emphasis on covert measures of processing.

However, a new book arrived today that provides a useful update on the vibrant field of political communication research.

As a shameless plug, I teamed up with former IU professor Erik Bucy on a chapter about using psychophysiology in political communication.

Bucy, E. P., & Bradley, S. D. (2011). What can the body tell us about politics? The use of psychophysiological measures in political communication research. In E. P. Bucy & R. L. Holbert (Eds.), The sourcebook for political communication research: Methods, measures, and analytical techniques (pp. 525-540). New York: Routledge.

ISBN-13: 978-0-415-96495-1

On Amazon.com!

Today is time to celebrate the annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Portland, Oregon.

As always, this culmination of great minds and thoughts refreshed my intellectual batteries and prepared me for another year in the trenches of academe.

The research, as always, reminded me the fruit of brilliant minds focused on important problems. For this reason, SPR continues to trump all other conferences in my mind. Plans already are under way for Boston 2011.

Three generations of communication scholars met at this psychology-based conference, and our imprint continues to grow in importance. Perhaps this is best explained by University of Missouri doctoral student Saleem Alhabash winning the student poster competition, the first award garnered by a communications scholar at the conference.

Meeting with my advisor, Annie Lang, and former doctoral program faculty always inspires, and once again Texas Tech brought more doctoral students than any other communications program. My thanks to Wendy Maxian (graduated 2009), Curtis Matthews, Brandon Nutting, and Kent Lowry for representing our program so well.

From my vantage point, these students were equally inspired by the possibilities of great research, and Brandon busied himself designing studies all the way back to Lubbock.

There were a few moments to visit Man vs. Food sites in the Rose City.

We also had time to take the Portland Aerial Tram to the Oregon Health & Science University, which provided breathtaking views of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood.

In all, we found the city to be beautiful, clean, exceedingly packed, and Prius-packed. To a person, we look forward to returning, and several of us plotted schemes to move there.

Brains and souls refreshed, it’s time to return to the daily grind.

They certainly were no used by knights during The Crusades in the 1200s, as not a single reference exists to them in the literature.

All this I learned at a lecture this evening, “The Myth of the Chastity Belt,” by University of Arizona distinguished research professor Dr. Albrecht Classen.

It was a fascinating, riveting talk by a dynamic speaker. He really made the Middle Ages come alive, and he wove arguments of epistemology and evidence into his talk.

If I hadn’t visited the museum 15 years ago, I likely would not  have had my curiosity sufficiently piqued to venture over to the Foreign Languages building.

Sorry the picture is a little blurry, but it’s got a chastity belt. So you win some, you lose some.

This blog serves as the outreach from my lab to the professional world. My 2009 goals for my career and this blog focus on making better connections this year.

Chris Brogan’s post on three goals inspired me to pin down the goals: relevance, outreach, and relationships.

Relevance

We in academia must do a better job getting our work into the hands of media workers. We must make it relevant.

Brogan said, “Simply, the work I do in 2009 is not about theory.”

Well, the work that I do is about theory. And that’s a good thing.

A good social scientific theory illuminates patterns that never could be seen simply chasing one practical problem at a time. A good theory helps intelligently guide behavior in meaningful ways.

But that’s not immediately intuitive, and it relies upon good theories. There’s a lot of good work being done in communication science. You’ll see me strive here to make it relevant to my students, our alumni, and most importantly, the broader media and social media industries.

Outreach

Relevance goes both ways. I will try to show you how our work is relevant to you. But I also need to know what you’re doing.

That is, I need your help. So I’ll be asking for your help in 2009. In addition to reading your blogs, newsletters, and Tweets, I’ll be contacting you for help. I’ll ask what you’re doing that my students need to know today.

For those of you who are especially generous with your time, I’ll ask you to speak to my classes. Since Texas Tech is in remote rural West Texas, we’ll make good use of Skype.

So many of you already have been generous with your time and offered to share, and for that I am extremely appreciative.

Guest Posts

Part of my outreach will involve writing on other blogs. My goal is simply to get more information about what we’re doing in the lab into your hands.

I love my day job as a professor, and I’m not trying to trade that in. But the word must get out.

I believe passionately in what we do, and I know you’re not hearing about it. Wherever the opportunity arises, I will try to engage you in a conversation about the intersection of research and practice.

Relationships

When we connect and engage, we need to take advantage of that inertia. I believe that we can have a reciprocal pattern of value added relationships.

Your practice and insights will benefit our teaching and research. And our research — and our students who are better prepared thanks to your advice — will benefit your practice.

There is no ivory tower. But there are a lot of talented researchers doing good work but frustrated that their results never impact industry.

Together we can improve industry, individuals, and academics. I hope you’ll start today with a comment below. What can my colleagues and I do to make your media careers and lives better?

Happy New Year!

Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com