i got my doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from the university of washington in 1998. this enables me to be snooty at people who call me "miss", and also to yak about nifty neurological trivia at parties.
i did a lot of stuff in graduate school that isn't actually reflected by my dissertation. i did a little work criticizing the "symbolic distance effect" by examining how small numbers and letters of the alphabet are encoded as human data structures, particularly in people with turner's syndrome. i spent several years studying how high-school physics classes can be structured to successfully teach science to girls; here's an ugly and incomplete version of a paper that came out of that work. i also helped found and run the uw's pagan culture and spirit web, and the society for human sexuality. i started a little household that's still a great place to be at the murkworks, i survived a bunch of psychodramas, and somewhere i picked up an interest in wild mushrooms.
my actual doctoral work, though, was on what your brain is doing when
you are doing language. my advisor was dr. lee osterhout, who i can
honestly say was insightful, kind, and extremely tenacious throughout :)
and here is the dissertation that i wrote:
the abstract
header stuff; table of contents and acknowledgements
the bulk of the dissertation itself
references
appendices, mostly containing stimulus lists
a brief and vaguely sarcastic vita, which i
didn't know i was going to have to write until quite literally the final hour
the figures aren't actually linked to in the text in any way at this point,
which makes reading the dissertation quite the imagination exercise for
the reader. at some point i'll scan in the actual source images and make
links; in the meanwhile, here are directories containing some of the images
for yer viewin' pleasure:
a bunch with (possibly wrong) figure #'s
another bunch with vaguely descriptive filenames
i'd like to express here my immense gratitude to my reluctant mentor, emily van zee; to jim minstrell and the other high-school teachers who allowed me into their classrooms to do some science about their work; to the many minions of the murkworks who lived with me and ate sushi with me and generally put up with an overworked and frequently cranky individual; and to reflections software for keeping me gainfully enough employed to pay for all that sushi while i tried to learn things about brains.
and i'd also like to explain why i think that higher education is like having a pet white rhinoceros. nobody really needs one, but there's definitely some kind of weird cachet to having one. if you decide you want one, no substitute will ever really do. getting one will teach you lots and lots of things, only some of which seem relevant or were what you really wanted or expected to find out. lots of people who embark on the process will bail out somewhere along the way, but are not to be disdained for doing so. but somehow, if you've actually got one, you feel entitled to just a tiny bit of extra respect :)