Michael J. Spivey

Michael J. Spivey, Ph.D., is the author of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness and The Continuity of Mind. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Spivey moved to the University of California, Merced to help build their Cognitive Science Program. His research uses eye-tracking, computer-mouse tracking, neural network models and dynamical systems theory to explore how a mind emerges from the interaction of brain, body, and environment. In 2010, Spivey received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society.

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?

I figured I would start with the light-hearted questions first and save the discussion of worrying and Imposter Syndrome for last. I am ashamed to admit that I cannot stand graphic novels and comic books. Believe me, I have tried. My buddy Steve Knowlton and I once read two stacks of comic books as research for a book chapter on anti-heroes. Examining the stories was intriguing and writing the chapter together was deeply rewarding but reading the comic books was excruciating – due solely to the format. Even though I am not a particularly fast reader, the flow rate of language in a comic book or graphic novel is just too slow for me (I have a similar experience with audiobooks). Each picture frame has just a sentence or two and then an image that you are expected to absorb in a less linguistic manner. My eyes scan the image looking for clues to the story line, and if nothing new comes up, then I feel I’ve just wasted my time. But if I skip an image, I run the risk of missing a subtle pictorial clue. It is a very different style of storytelling to which I have just not adapted. By contrast, I simply adore comic strips –particularly the weird ones. The Far Side and Life in Hell are amazing (and Calvin and Hobbes isn’t bad either). As an academic, I have to acknowledge the genius of xkcd.com. But my true absolute favorite comic strip of all time is unmistakably Zippy. When Zippy the Pinhead says, “Fun is just a three letter word,” he proves that, when you’re feeling down, surreal non-sequiturs are always the best pancakes.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I almost always listen to music while I write. In fact, I am listening to music while I write this (a band called Beak>). I find that a rhythmic flow of sound input helps me create a rhythmic flow of written output. But the music must have minimal lyrics or none at all. Although my favorite background music for hanging out with my buddies is certainly classic rock, the lyrics distract me, thus disrupting my ability to formulate my ideas into exquisitely overwrought sentences like this one. I don’t need that bad poetry getting accidentally incorporated into my prose. While writing, I like to listen to instrumental hip-hop, electronica, chill, post-rock, math rock, Krautrock, classical piano, cello and Gregorian chants, and many different genres of music in foreign languages that I don’t speak. Also, movie soundtracks are perfect: Jeff Russo in particular is a genius. On my music subscription app, I have a playlist devoted to writing; it has over 3,000 tracks on it that I like to put on shuffle. But when I am co-authoring a scientific paper with my colleague Rick Dale, he and I choose an album together over a chat window and do a countdown to start it synchronously on our respective headphones. We call it Sync-n-Think. The simultaneous rhythmic flow of sound synchronizes our brains a little bit. It may sound strange, but I think this has made for our best collaborative work.

Is there another profession you would like to try?

No.

The only other professions that even tempt me are unrealistic ones, such as sculptor or actor. Trying to be an artist for a living sounds like it could be spiritually rewarding, but I worry that the methods for success in those areas may not always be very well tied to the quality of the work, but instead tied to social networking. At least in academia, there tends to be a reasonable amount of quantifiable assessment measures for the quality of one’s work, such as citation rates and teaching evaluations. If your work gets published in respected journals and respected presses, and it gets cited by other researchers reasonably often, then those metrics can support keeping you employed with a clear conscience. In business, the quality of your work is perhaps reasonably assessed by how well it supports the mission of garnering customers – but I’m not comfortable working that closely to the demands of the profit motive. When business cooperates with academia, it can sometimes corrupt the science that goes on there.

What do you worry about?

I try very hard not to worry. Instead of worrying, I look for ways to insert protective measures into my life that reduce the dangers, and then I don’t think about those dangers. I pay for health insurance, try to eat right and exercise (and adhere to social distancing recommendations these days) precisely so that I don’t have to worry about my health. Worrying too much about your health can literally make you sick. I pay for life insurance so that I don’t have to worry about how my family might support themselves without me. It’s a lot like why I pay my gardener to take care of my yard: It’s not so much because I want a nice-looking yard; it’s because I don’t want to have to do it myself. If I put those protective measures into my life as reasonably steady habits, then those things do the “worrying” for me and I don’t have to do it myself.

One worry I have that crops up once in a while, and for which I have no sufficiently protective measures, is that the version of Mother Earth that will be left to my son may be one in which climate change, pandemics, and economic strife turn humanity into the full-blown self-destructive planetary virus that it sometimes resembles. Have you ever compared an electron microscope image of a virus populating the inside of a cell to a satellite image of city spreading over a landmass? That’s when I need Zippy the Pinhead to step in and give me one of his zingers like, “All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.”

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

Yes. Several times. During my first year of graduate school, I was overcome by Imposter Syndrome for at least a month. Over time, getting scientific manuscripts accepted for publication at conferences and journals helped quash that unhealthy version of self-consciousness. But it reared its ugly head again during my first few years as an assistant professor at Cornell. Several of the older faculty around me were so blisteringly intelligent that I often felt I may not stack up. Over time, I learned that a substantial portion of their intelligence was not an innate ability they had and that I might not have; it was mostly decades of experience and practice they had in their field that made them so smart.  Now, much older, I consider myself about as smart as they were then. (Of course, those profs who are still alive are surely still smarter than me now.) The lesson here, I guess, is that there is in fact a germ of truth to “Imposter Syndrome” but you shouldn’t let that self-doubt get in your way. Instead, you should just put your nose to the grindstone and get better at the work. My advice is: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes; just be ready to correct them as quickly as possible. When you’re doing difficult work, try to go on autopilot whenever possible. Being conscious of your work runs the risk of your becoming self-conscious in a way that hampers your innovation and creativity. Evaluate your performance only after your performance. And learn from your mistakes. In the case of writing, good writing will always be re-writing. But that first draft should be an uninhibited explosion of ideas, without self-consciousness. To quote Zippy the Pinhead, “Consciousness is vastly overrated.”