In a play an actor must always play multiple characters. A character isn't (shouldn't be) 2-dimensional. In day-to-day life a person must put on all kinds of masks, use various sorts of voices to match prior schema -- pre-determined actions for certain social situations. Exempli gratia, consider you're having a conversation in a public place, say, a popular study spot (any study spot that is also popular probably isn't very apt for the task of study, but that's beside the point). Your friend is very concerned about his relationship with somebody, so that's what's at hand. Eventually, some other person comes over and joins the conversation. Woah! What just happened? Was there a noticeable shift in how you continued conversing? Hint: there was.
When you and your friend were talking alone, you were both more or less natural with your speech and manner. Here's the kicker: if interaction is observed, it becomes performance. And the great thing is, there doesn't even have to be a physical audience for such performance to begin; the performer merely has to imagine one. In psychology, we call this the imaginary audience (quel suprise). It's what happens to teenagers when they're worried about looking cool and fearing embarrassment around every turn. There's also something psychologists call the spotlight effect, which is almost the same thing.
A quote from my Statistics textbook: "The spotlight effect refers to overestimating the extent to which others notice your appearance or behavior, especially when you commit a faux pas. Effectively, you feel as if you are suddenly standing in a spotlight with everyone watching. In one demonstration of this phenomenon, Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) asked college students to put on a Barry Manilow T-shirt that fellow students had previously judged to be embarrassing. The participants were then led into a room in which other students were already participating in an experiment. After a few minutes, the participant was led back out of the room and was allowed to remove the shirt [thank goodness]. Later, each participant was asked to estimate how many people in the room had noticed the shirt. The individuals in the room were also asked whether they noticed the shirt. In the study, the participants significantly overestimated the actual number of people who had noticed." (From "Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences," by Frederick J. Gravetter and Larry B. Wallnau, 2011)
I'm going to write a self-help book with a title that I know will sell a million copies. I'll call it, "Nobody Cares: Empowering Yourself by Eliminating the Imaginary Audience." Half Joking. Give it ten years.
Part of what the class Actor as Thinker is about is how to internalize cognitive processes so that you're actually thinking as your character would, and not as someone standing on the stage worrying about what the audience is thinking. Forgetting the audience is difficult; to do so one must interact with the other characters onstage and have a vested interest in what they have to say. You have to listen to them, otherwise your next line has no motivation. The chemistry and emotional interactions of the actors is just as important as the script. Sure, you can have one without the other, but you'd end up with either a book on tape or a silent film (both are reasonable pastimes, but they're not theatre).
The mind is complex, and getting in touch with it onstage takes some time. I'll leave you with a dramatic exercise of the mind: emotional scales. Close your eyes and think of a time in your life when you were neutral -- no sadness, not really happy -- just content. This is 5. Now think of a time when you were a little miffed about something. You were just less than content. This is 4. Think of individual memories to take the places of 3 down to 0, with 0 being incredibly depressed and angry. Come back up to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, becoming less angry and more okay with things. The next memory, for 6, is one where you were just a little happier than content. 7 is happier, and so on to 10, which is the happiest moment you can remember. Come back down one step at a time until you're again resting at 5. Checking in with emotional memories from time to time can give you the necessary tools to feel what your character's supposed to feel in the scene, because your character has as many characters inside him/her as you do. Spooky.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Homework, Social Life, Sleep: Choose Two
Let's talk Psychology, homework, and sleep.
Though the events of last Wednesday are hazy at best, I think it went something like this:
7:12 PM -- A member of the cast of my radio show had to skip that evening due to excessive homework. This was problematic because another member had already declined the day before.
7:35 PM -- While having an emergency production meeting with my co-producer I call the last cast member, aside from ourselves, to say not to bother coming to the show that evening because "Dexter and I are going to find something to do by ourselves."
8:15 PM -- With less than an hour before showtime (and after my first idea to do Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" is shot down) we decide to do Stephen King's short story "1408" because we figured there was enough dialogue between the two characters to pass it off as a radio drama ). Then again, there was an awful lot of narration, so we decided that one of the two of us needed to be the narrator -- me, because Dexter wanted to be John Cusack. Fine, but now we need someone to play Samuel L. Jackson's part. (For those not in the know, these were the actors who played the two main characters in the movie adaptation of the same title.) "I have an idea: can Samuel L. Jackson be a woman?" The answer was yes and, thanks to a persuasive 30-second conversation, the cast was made.
The show went a bit longer than usual and, remember, we only had three cast members. By the end, my voice was having difficulties and there are some unfortunate sounds of water being gulped at the end of the recording.
I know what you're thinking, where does Psychology fit in here? It doesn't, that's why I was up 'till 6 AM doing a homework assignment that usually would've been completed over the course of two days.
11:30 PM -- Statistics homework
Now, I'm not sure whether my method of doing statistics homework is unusual, but I don't think it's typical. After about a decade of struggling with mathematics classes I finally decided to change part of the way in which I do the homework. Before I begin working through any calculations I write (type) the entire problem out. While this may be a time-consuming method of doing things, it helps in a way I attribute to cognitive momentum (a phrase which I just made up, but which has probably already been coined by psychologists the world over). The idea is that you do something easy -- transcription -- and while reading over the problem a couple of times you can start to get vague notions of where it's going and of what kind of answer to expect. Additionally, it's extremely helpful when checking my work after it's been graded. If there's just a bunch of numbers and symbols on the page I find it difficult to find where my errors lie. If, however, everything is typed and worked out line by line, it's easier to find the faults. Usually, for me, it's an error in transcribing from the book where I do something like write a 3 where there should be a 2 and have the whole problem get messed up at step one.
Continuing on with what I mentioned in my last post, I've decided that it'd be a capital idea to write an entire statistics text book using zombies for all the examples. Throughout the book there'd be a natural progression from Chapter One's discussion of outbreak to Chapter 12's on the complete annihilation of humanity.
Try this: To evaluate the effect of a zombie virus antidote, a sample is obtained from a population with a mean of μ
---
Bonus Class Update
In Technical Theatre the class became Foley artists. A Foley artist is someone who makes sound effects for movies with whatever's lying around. Named after Jack Foley, a guy who used to do the sound effects for silent movies, Foley is in virtually every modern movie because the same microphones that pick up actors' voices can't always pick up the needed sound effects. Foley becomes especially necessary in epic motion pictures with explosions or arrows whizzing by or sword fights. Pictures like "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," a scene from which we watched in class and for which we proceeded to make sound effects using whatever was lying around. You want the sound of castle walls exploding and chunks of stone falling to the ground? Try large plastic bowls falling accompanied by blocks of wood. The sound of armor-clad orcs marching? Try two people marching on hollow steps while jangling chains. It went better than I make it out to have.
Bonus list: the five measurable qualities of sound: Duration, Pitch, Location, Volume, and Timbre.
---
Make sure to get thyself to CMT's Cabaret this evening in the Grind to hear some great show tunes sung by your colleagues.
Though the events of last Wednesday are hazy at best, I think it went something like this:
7:12 PM -- A member of the cast of my radio show had to skip that evening due to excessive homework. This was problematic because another member had already declined the day before.
7:35 PM -- While having an emergency production meeting with my co-producer I call the last cast member, aside from ourselves, to say not to bother coming to the show that evening because "Dexter and I are going to find something to do by ourselves."
8:15 PM -- With less than an hour before showtime (and after my first idea to do Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" is shot down) we decide to do Stephen King's short story "1408" because we figured there was enough dialogue between the two characters to pass it off as a radio drama ). Then again, there was an awful lot of narration, so we decided that one of the two of us needed to be the narrator -- me, because Dexter wanted to be John Cusack. Fine, but now we need someone to play Samuel L. Jackson's part. (For those not in the know, these were the actors who played the two main characters in the movie adaptation of the same title.) "I have an idea: can Samuel L. Jackson be a woman?" The answer was yes and, thanks to a persuasive 30-second conversation, the cast was made.
The show went a bit longer than usual and, remember, we only had three cast members. By the end, my voice was having difficulties and there are some unfortunate sounds of water being gulped at the end of the recording.
I know what you're thinking, where does Psychology fit in here? It doesn't, that's why I was up 'till 6 AM doing a homework assignment that usually would've been completed over the course of two days.
11:30 PM -- Statistics homework
Now, I'm not sure whether my method of doing statistics homework is unusual, but I don't think it's typical. After about a decade of struggling with mathematics classes I finally decided to change part of the way in which I do the homework. Before I begin working through any calculations I write (type) the entire problem out. While this may be a time-consuming method of doing things, it helps in a way I attribute to cognitive momentum (a phrase which I just made up, but which has probably already been coined by psychologists the world over). The idea is that you do something easy -- transcription -- and while reading over the problem a couple of times you can start to get vague notions of where it's going and of what kind of answer to expect. Additionally, it's extremely helpful when checking my work after it's been graded. If there's just a bunch of numbers and symbols on the page I find it difficult to find where my errors lie. If, however, everything is typed and worked out line by line, it's easier to find the faults. Usually, for me, it's an error in transcribing from the book where I do something like write a 3 where there should be a 2 and have the whole problem get messed up at step one.
Continuing on with what I mentioned in my last post, I've decided that it'd be a capital idea to write an entire statistics text book using zombies for all the examples. Throughout the book there'd be a natural progression from Chapter One's discussion of outbreak to Chapter 12's on the complete annihilation of humanity.
Try this: To evaluate the effect of a zombie virus antidote, a sample is obtained from a population with a mean of μ
---
Bonus Class Update
In Technical Theatre the class became Foley artists. A Foley artist is someone who makes sound effects for movies with whatever's lying around. Named after Jack Foley, a guy who used to do the sound effects for silent movies, Foley is in virtually every modern movie because the same microphones that pick up actors' voices can't always pick up the needed sound effects. Foley becomes especially necessary in epic motion pictures with explosions or arrows whizzing by or sword fights. Pictures like "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," a scene from which we watched in class and for which we proceeded to make sound effects using whatever was lying around. You want the sound of castle walls exploding and chunks of stone falling to the ground? Try large plastic bowls falling accompanied by blocks of wood. The sound of armor-clad orcs marching? Try two people marching on hollow steps while jangling chains. It went better than I make it out to have.
Bonus list: the five measurable qualities of sound: Duration, Pitch, Location, Volume, and Timbre.
---
Make sure to get thyself to CMT's Cabaret this evening in the Grind to hear some great show tunes sung by your colleagues.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Statistics for Zombies
I have a confession to make. Lately I’ve been avoiding
writing about Statistics (PSYCH 105), though it is one of the courses in which
I’m enrolled. It seemed a difficult subject about which to write in any sort of,
shall we say, non-boring fashion. The thing is, though, statistics is a
massively important part of psychology. Without proper,
standardized, evaluative measures any sort of
“experiment” could only be written up in the form of anecdote, and any shocking
advances in the subject would needlessly be relegated to the realm of urban
legend, because how would we know if the experimenter weren’t engaging in some
serious confirmation bias? For the following example, I will attempt to veer
from the beaten path for the sake of education.
Consider a sample of n = 36 zombie hunters who’ve taken
a zombie survival class for one year prior to the zombocalypse. They average a kill-count of M = 5 zombies a
day, with the added benefit of not getting eaten. The entire rest of the
population from which this sample is taken may or may not have taken such a
class and has a mean kill-count of μ = 3 per day, and probably get eaten. Assume
a standard deviation of σ = 1 and standard level of significance of α = 0.05
with a two-tailed test. Finding the z-score (or, here, zombie score) is now a
simple matter of formula.
z = (M - μ) / (σ / √
n)
(5 - 3) / √36 =
0.333 = z
Such a low z-score cannot possibly recommend the course
as being statistically more significant. The null hypothesis cannot be rejected,
so one must assume that those who took the course are equally as likely to be
eaten as those who didn’t take the course.
Thank goodness I took statistics before the world blew
up.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Space Rocks (pun intended):
Why It’s Not the End of the World
Dr. Tim Spahr is the Director of the Minor Planets Center, funded by the Smithsonian, funded by NASA. He’s in charge of recording
all the near Earth objects (NEOs) floating around in space, and the guy to whom
the government turns when there’s question of one of these space rocks colliding
with our little planet. Last Thursday he gave a lecture to my Astronomy 001
class insisting that, though 1 in 2000 asteroids come close enough to the Earth
to pose threat of collision (and there are hundreds of asteroids regularly posed
to do so), 96% of all the large near-Earth objects have
been discovered (that is, those objects which would actually pose a threat if
they crashed into the Earth -- not small rocks which routinely fall to Earth and
which people don’t always notice). Ergo the Minor Planets Center would be in the
know if there were a major threat on the scale of, say, mass-extinction
event-causing space rock.
The point he was trying to make was that there’s little
conceivable threat of any sort of asteroid extinguishing life on Earth. Whew.
Now I can use my energy to worry about real problems like what kind of cereal to
have. And then, suppose there’s no milk of the 1 or 2% varieties? Do I go with
whole or fat-free? I can only imagine what sort of chaos
would break loose should such an event transpire. All I can say is that I’m not
going to be caught unawares when the rabble pours into
the streets for a nice night of dinner and looting. As I learned from the
classic treatise on the subject of post-apocalyptic life, Max Brooks’s “The
Zombie Survival Guide,” should access to a crossbow be unreasonable, a hot air
balloon will do nicely.
Which acts as a good segue to this next paragraph.
Recently Clark has been host to a sort of symposium on “The End of Things,” a film and lecture series about… the
end of things. Last night I caught a lecture by K. David Harrison of Swarthmore
College on the extinction (and preservation) of language in an increasingly
globalized world. Which is interesting, but so are zombies. I heard on the
grapevine (which, admittedly, is a bit wilted now considering how October it is)
that associate dean Jason Zelesky“The Walking Dead” on the
15th. Perhaps it’s time to consider what all
this end of the world hullabaloo (pardon my French) is actually doing for
society. For those of us almost old enough to properly remember Y2K there’s a
sort of apathy for any theory that the world’s about to end. It’s just run of
the mill disappointment. It’s like, hey, media, you said that the world was
going to end in 2000, but it didn’t, so I’m just going to stand here with my
arms crossed and head tilted slightly to one side and say, “Really? Again with
this apocalypse business?” But most people don’t really believe the world’s
going to end in the near future. Or, if they do, they keep calm and carry on
because what if the world’s not over tomorrow? It’s going
to awfully inconvenient, and probably awkward to come into work on Monday and
pretend like you weren’t recently chanting on a mountain to get beamed up before
the Judgment. “Hey, Steve, how was your weekend?”
“Uneventful.”
Luckily, says Dr. Spahr, the military has various plans
for what to do should impending doom by space rock be
staring humanity in the face. One such is a gravity tractor, which isn’t as
complicated as you’d think. It’s like a big object launched to hang out next to
the asteroid and convince it to pull to one side of the Earth instead of
crashing into it.
“Hey, asteroid, what’s up?”
“Oh, you, know, just goin’ to fall into that planet over
there.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, but I hear there’s this great party
off in deep space just to the side of that planet.”
“Oh, man, I’m in!”
And that’s how science works.
Another option is the nuclear strategy. Apparently,
every time there’s word of an asteroid near Earth the military’s just like,
let’s nuke it! Even if there isn’t a threat, people sometimes want to do it just
to see what happens. (As far as I’m aware, as of this writing, there haven’t
been any nuclear devices launched outside of our atmosphere.) Scientists are
usually the voices of reason to say, no, no; that’s a bad idea. Let’s
not.
The concept of the end of the world is an interesting
and pervasive thing in our culture, and even I’m not immune to its influence,
having just read the first of six parts of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on ROCU, in which the
World gets destroyed by aliens to make room for a hyperspace expressway. Listen
in next Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern to find out what
happens and to, maybe, pick up some tips for your own survival. Do you know
where your towel is?
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