Procrastination – What’s The Excuse?

By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer

The deadline is 11:59 PM, and here you are staring at the computer and typing as fast as you could at 11:57 PM? Welcome to the procrastinators club! 

Sometimes, we choose to procrastinate because we have certain strategies to deal with it. Sadly, sometimes we are simply in a psychological trap, causing the situation above. So what is the psychological trap that makes us procrastinate?

Adrenaline is a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands located at the top of each kidney. Everytime our body is in a stressful condition, adrenaline will be produced. When you are extremely stressed, you will have an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline breaks down glycogen into glucose. Enough glucose will provide energy for the brain to think, learn, and memorize quicker. That’s why whenever the deadlines are coming, you are more focused and able to think better, thanks to the adrenaline rush. However, if you experience a constant adrenaline rush, it will have a negative long-term effect on your body. In “The End of Stress as We Know It”, Dr. Bruce McEwen – a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University – stated that if our body experiences constant long-term stress, then the brain, the immune system, and the circulatory system will be weakened. Significant symptoms include insomnia, feeble resistance, or even anxiety disorder. Additionally, too much adrenaline will cause hyperglycemia, also known as high blood sugar, a major cause for diabetes. 

A reason for being procrastinated might come from the fact that you are afraid of changes and the desire to remain in the comfort zone. That was the conclusion drawn from a study of two psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908, called the Yerkes-Dodson law. Basically, humans prefer being in the comfort zone, such as doing tasks that are familiar, don’t require too much effort, and aren’t challenging. Because of that, we don’t get a lot of pressure and face any assessment of our qualifications. Deadline, on the other hand, is considered out of the comfort zone with many risks and challenges. So when it comes to deadlines, we tend to procrastinate as a way to protect ourselves from the risks and challanges, for when we confront failure, we are likely to blame our failure on other things and not our own self.

When you are given more time to finish a task, we tend to spend all that extra time on that task, even though it’s not necessary and less efficient than finishing the task by the original deadline. This is called the Parkinson’s law, a study of Cyril Northcote Parkinson – a British naval historian. He gave an example of a task in which one has to write a letter and send it to someone else. He claimed that a normal person would take several hours to finish, while a busy businessman only takes three minutes to accomplish the task. 

When you are given a task, the first thing you wonder is usually: “how much time do I have to finish this task?” instead of “how much time do we need to finish this task?”. This kind of thinking will cause you to unconsciously schedule and complete the task by the deadlines, which leads to delays in other tasks that would have been completed earlier. Moreover, the longer the deadlines, the harder you would think of it. 

The Meaningless of A Repeated Word

By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer

You were focusing on a good book when all of a sudden, you got distracted and lost track of the book. You had to re-read the paragraph again, but a weird thing happened. You stared at the words for a minute and suddenly, the word became unfamiliar. After a few minutes staring at it, you believe that it wasn’t misspelled, but it still looked like there was something wrong with it, even after you checked the dictionary. Are there any reasons behind this strange phenomenon?

In “Verbal Conditioning and Behaviour”, Dr. Jagannath Prasad Das defined “semantic satiation” as a loss of meaning of a word following its massed evocation as the word is repeated over and over again. When this study is expanded, it is suggested that this psychological phenomenon is applied for readers as well. In Dr. Leon Jakobovits’s 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University, he pointed out that when we stare at a word for a long time, this psychological phenomenon will be activated which makes the word look strange and unfamiliar, even with the simplest word.

“Unconscious inference” was first proposed in 19th century by a physicist Hermann Helmholtz, where inference refers to the idea that the brain conjectures what might be out there, and the unconscious reminds us that we have no awareness of the process. This process constantly occurs since we were born. An example for unconscious inference is the brain tends to think the Sun moves around the Earth – sunrise and sunset. However, in fact, the truth is the Earth orbits around the Sun, it’s just the brain thinks that what we see is the Sun orbits the Earth. Likewise, when we read and perceive language, our brains are in an unconscious inference state. So, when we stare at a word longer than we should, this state of mind is interrupted, causing the brain to “question” the meaning of that word.

The study “Communication in the Real Word” from Minnesota University dug deep into the essence of language and claimed that the language system is primarily made up of symbols which combine to deliver messages. When we perceive language, we perceive the combination of factors that make a language meaningful, not perceive it separately. Therefore, when we read a word, we don’t just read letter by letter, we read the whole word structurally in order to avoid looking at the words by its letter and break its meaningful structure.

Why can we recall specific memories through music?

By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer

Have you ever wondered why music can help you recall specific memories from the past? Human memory is an incredibly complex mechanism. It could be precisely explicit and detailed, but it could sometimes be distorted and unreliable. We usually remember the negative memory, and yet we can easily forget even the simplest things like other people’s names or a phone number. 

Illustration by Janne Kokkonen

The way that we recall memories is just as complex as its mechanism. Occasionally, we would unconsciously dream about a memory or even associate it with smells or music. For example, lots of people can recall being excited and rushing out of the house for ice cream when they hear the music from the ice cream truck. 

Our brain can easily retrieve memories based on rhythms

The hippocampus, embedded deep into the temporal lobe, plays a major role in forming new memories, storing, and retrieving. That’s why for Alzheimer’s patients, because the hippocampus is damaged, they cannot store and retrieve the new memories causing them to instantly forget things that just happened and still be able to recall old memories. 

However, we experienced countless experiences and events in our lifetime, and the amount of memories formed is massive. Therefore, retrieving them is not always an easy job for the hippocampus, that’s when music steps in and does its magic. Music will then become one of the tools that help you “unlock” memories through encoded “signals”. These “signals” include melody, rhythms, and images that relate to the lyrics. Research also showed that music enhances neuronal connection at the hippocampus, increasing musicians’ ability to recall memories related to familiar melodies. Basically, it’s like how you recall the alphabet by humming the “ABC song” or a name of a singer through a catchy chorus they sang. 

Music activates emotions enclosed with the memory

When you listen to a song with an explicit emotion, such as the song you listened to after a breakup, you will recall that sad feeling every time you listen to it as a classical conditioning. This can be explained through the impact of music on the amygdala, which is primarily responsible for processing emotions. The more emotions attached with your memory, the easỉer you can recall it. Many research studies demonstrated the vital role of emotions in different stages of memorization from encoding, consolidating, to recalling. 

Music activates the motion enclosed with the memory

Besides from the hippocampus and the amygdala, music also activates the cerebellum, which is responsible for motor control and movement direction. For instance, when you play an instrument or dance, the cerebellum helps with motion control, balancing, and combination of different movements, as well as remembering and perfecting them. Therefore, memories regarding the motion associated with music are easier to recall. In several studies regarding dementia, there are cases where patients, despite being unable to recall any past memories, were still able to play the piano skillfully. 

 Due to the complex relationship with the brain, music (beside its entertaining features) can be applied to different fields such as education, medical, or just simply help with relaxation and enhancing the ability to focus.