Monday 4 June 2012

The Inaugural 'Name Our New Blog' Competition

We have recently accepted an offer to blog on Psychology Today, where we will have an opportunity to talk to a wider popular science audience about the various crazy things we think psychology should be up to. We're very excited by the opportunity; this blog will continue to be home for all our more serious theorising and occasional whacky experiment idea but we're looking forward to trying out some of these ideas with a broader audience in mind. 

The new blog will feature some posts from here reworked for a more general audience, especially some of our embodied cognition stuff, as well as new material as we try out ideas for another project currently under development. The broad focus will be less on developing new theory, and more on introducing the core ideas to an interested audience, and to promote the existence of alternative ways to do cognitive science.

However, we need a name for the blog! The editor who contacted us suggested something like 'Against the Grain', seeing as how we spend most of our time pushing back against a lot of modern psychology. We quite like this broad idea, but we thought we might need something pithy and eye catching that also conveys a little more information. Some ideas we thought might not quite work are 'Psychology: You're All Doing It Wrong' and 'Please Allow Me To Explain My Theory To You In Excruciating Detail'*; but if you follow the blog or the Twitter feed you should get the general ball park.

We thought a Twitter/blog reader competition seemed only fair, seeing as how your support and interest is what made this opportunity available to us, so please, post your suggestions in the comments below or tweet us @PsychScientists. If you see one you like, reply to it with a vote!

*(Ed Yong has referred to my writing as 'dense but interesting' at least twice, which I like to think is a compliment but a hint :)

19 comments:

  1. Thinking twice.

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  2. Greg Henriques suggested a bit ago that I move to Psychology Today. Are you going to do both blogs, or a complete switch?

    Also: "Behavior, bitches. That's what I'm talking about."

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    1. I vote for this one (I love meta-level puns)!

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    2. Heh - I appreaciate it too.

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  5. Dynamic Perspectives or Dynamic Perspectives on Psychology

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  6. It's all outside your head.

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  7. Gregg Henriques suggested a while ago that I switch to Psychology Today, but I wasn't sure I wanted to write that for-the-public all the time. Are you going to keep both, or switch fully to PsychToday?

    Also, I suggest: "Behavior, bitches! It's what we're talking about."

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    1. We'll run this one too - going after a popular audience is a useful move for us, but we have a lot of actual science to do here too (eg the ongoing language stuff, and the specification stuff I'm about to start posting).

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  8. Maybe something like 'Outfielders' to capture being on the fringe. And everyone likes a good in-joke :p

    Although I am a big fan of Behaviour, bitches...

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  9. Sense and Sensibility
    or
    The Sensations

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  10. We definitely need a good literary reference; something that implies a lot of information.

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  11. I agree with Ed. I like your posts a lot, though they can be dense, I don't always finish. Editing for brevity is a difficult trick. It'll be interesting to see how things play out on a bigger stage.

    I think you should call it "Neuro Proust Neuro Foucalt Neuro Gallileo Neuro"
    :P

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  12. A Skinner-themed 'More than one way to Skin a cat' or a Gibson-themed 'Upsetting the apple cart'

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  13. Glad to hear that you're not giving up on this site.

    For new one, how about "Not That Kind of Psychology"? Ought to set the tone...

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  14. How about "Thinking Outside the Brain"? Pun on 'thinking outside the box,' emphasizing embodied cognition.

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  15. We eventually went with Cognition Without Borders (Future directions in perception and embodied cognition) and it's up here. Posts soon!

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