[00:00:00] Dr. Mary Saczawa: I never expected to want to be a teacher. As I mentioned, my mom was a librarian. Before that, she had been a classroom teacher. She was a high school math teacher, and then she was a K-12 art teacher. Then she moved to just elementary art.

[music]

[00:00:22] Gretchen Roe: Hello, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. I am so wildly excited to welcome Dr. Mary Saczawa today. This is a full-circle journey for me because Mary is a professor of neuropsychology. That was my emphasis when I was in college. Then I went off to have children and did not return to that. I’ve also known Mary since she was, as the phrase goes, a twinkle in her daddy’s eye. I’ve known her her whole life. It is so awesome to watch her in this guise now as a college professor. This is going to be a wild conversation today because I’ve known her mom for 40 years.

We are two peas in a pod. We only see each other once, maybe twice a year. When we’re together, we have that blessed friendship that means we pick up the threads exactly where we laid them down when we saw each other last. Mary has joined me today because we want you to understand the world of psychology, particularly the world of neuropsychology, since it is the fastest-growing field. I just want her to talk about what she does because, man, I think you’ll be as excited as I am. Mary, please introduce yourself.

[00:01:46] Dr. Saczawa: As Gretchen mentioned, my name is Mary Saczawa. I am an assistant professor of psychology at Hanover College in Southern Indiana. My area of expertise, I like to joke that I study why middle school messes you up for the rest of your life. I study puberty, popularity, and stress hormones, and how all of that goes into development of psychological disorders. A lot of my research has been focused on anxiety and depression and aggressive behavior problems, things like that.

In recent years, based on my own personal experiences and experiences that I’ve seen with my students, a lot of my emphasis has shifted toward hormonal and neurobiological correlates of neurodivergence, including autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, and things like that. Because of that, a lot of my teaching, I do social psychology, but most of my emphasis is on neuroscience, the biology of psychological disorders, development of psychological disorders.

As well as in recent years, I’ve also been teaching courses on behaviorism, which also fits in very well with the neurodivergence because it’s a lot of, if you are familiar with ABA therapy, the good and the bad. I know there are a lot of controversial opinions or there are a lot of differing opinions on ABA therapy, but these therapies largely are based on this concept of behaviorism. I teach a behaviorism course as well.

[00:03:18] Gretchen: What fascinates me, Mary, is we know so much more about the chemistry of learning than we did when I was in college, back as my kids say, when rocks were soft. It has become really wildly enlightening for me. I use a lot of neurobiology when I talk with homeschool families so that they understand how their kids learn and when the terminus is, beyond which learning ceases.

I’m just excited to get the chance to talk to you today because I think we’re all going to learn a whole bunch. Mary, can we start talking about why this particular kind of psychology became a fascination for you? There’s thousands of branches of psychology to pursue. How did you end up here?

[00:04:15] Dr. Saczawa: Actually, the very first time that I got interested in neuroscience and in biological psychology is actually from a book. My mom was a librarian for many years. Even before she was a librarian, even before she was professionally a librarian, librarian was a major hobby of hers.

[00:04:36] Gretchen: She’s a bookaholic. Actually, we have a webinar with her about talking to a librarian about reading. I’ll even link that in our show notes. One of the books, and I actually have a copy of it in my office, is this book called A Mango-Shaped Space. It is by Wendy Meth. It is about a teenage girl who has a condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia is often referred to as a mixture of or a melding of senses. You can taste numbers or you can smell shapes. It is where we see some crossing of pathways in the sensory system. I read this book, and I was just fascinated by it.

I got really into synesthesia and the idea of synesthesia and the neuroscience behind it. That was when I was in middle school. I was going to be a veterinarian. That was my plan from six years old on. I had decided where I was going to go to vet school. I had decided where I was going to go to undergrad based on where I wanted to go to vet school, because it was a little bit easier to get into their vet school. If I went there for undergrad, I was going to go to UT Knoxville. I really liked their small animal vet program. When I was in high school– my high school, I went to a small school in rural Alabama. We didn’t have a lot of extracurricular options, and I was bored.

I decided that I wanted to take some classes at the community college. Now, I couldn’t take most of the courses that I wanted to as prerequisites for vet school. I couldn’t take any biology. I couldn’t take any chemistry because I was still in high school. I didn’t have the prerequisites to be able to take those courses. One of the courses that they had that I could take was Intro Psych. My parents assured me this will count as a general education requirement at pretty much any school. Go ahead and take that. The credit will transfer. It’ll count toward your general education requirement. The very first day of class, the professor says, “Who in here is planning on majoring in psychology?”

About half the class raised their hand. I’m sitting there all smug like, “Not me. I’m going to be a veterinarian.” Three classes in, I was hooked. This is me now. This is who I’m going to be. I was also taking biology in high school at the same time. I basically said, “Why don’t we both it? Let’s do both together.” At the time, neuroscience as an undergraduate major was pretty rare. Now, they’re much more common. At the time, Emory University and Washington University in St. Louis were two of the only neuroscience undergraduate programs in the country. That is actually how I ended up picking my undergraduate college. I ended up at Emory University in Atlanta.

It was the much closer one. They had a neuroscience program. That is how I ended up doing this area of research. From there, while I was in undergrad, I started working in a lab studying schizophrenia and looking at neurobiological correlates of schizophrenia. In graduate school, my graduate program was– my master’s is in developmental psychology. For my doctorate, I added behavioral neuroscience on top of that. It’s developmental psychology and behavioral neuroscience. In addition to research design and statistics, I did a sub-concentration in statistics. We like to joke a lot in psychology that research is research. We study what we’re interested in. We study what we know.

I ended up, like I said, I studied miserable middle school experiences because my middle school experiences, not the best. Research is research. I really just got interested in why people are the way that they are and how different neurobiological factors can contribute to behavior. That’s how I ended up here. Was going to be a veterinarian. Took a class because it was a general education requirement, which most students, a lot of times will think of as, “Oh, these are classes. I don’t want to have to take art history.” Then they find their passion.

[00:09:08] Gretchen: That is very, very true. Do you still work in a research lab? Do you still run research?

[00:09:16] Dr. Saczawa: I am at a small liberal arts college. What that means is my emphasis is teaching. Most of the time, when you’re looking at big state institutions or what we call R1 or big research institutions like Emory, or things like Harvard or Purdue, or big state schools, those are typically going to have much more of an emphasis on research. The faculty members teaching maybe one course a semester, but most of their emphasis and most of what they’re evaluated on is going to be their research and grant funding and things like that. At small liberal arts colleges, our primary emphasis is teaching. I am teaching much smaller classes.

I’m doing much more one-on-one learning. I’m able to tailor the classes to my students much more than I could when I was teaching 250 students online at University of Florida when I was in grad school. Now, I have 12 students in a lab for my neuroscience course instead. I do research as well, though. A lot of my research, I have student research assistants who work with me. I’m actually currently doing some research looking at the effects of different cosmetic products and treatments that we use on hair and how that contributes to our ability to measure hormone concentrations in hair. Like you can measure drug use in hairs, we can do the same thing for hormones.

We don’t know really what the effects of washing your hair with different kinds of shampoo, blow drying it, use curling irons, things like that, what all that has an effect. I’m doing some of those studies right now along with a couple of students. We’re actually using my dog’s hair. My dog gets shaved pretty regularly. Whenever he gets shaved, I just take the hair along with me. We’re not shaving him specifically for research, but whenever he gets shaved, I keep some of that hair to do some tests on it.

[00:11:27] Gretchen: You’re a little bit in the field of veterinary science. I also remember the story of you having to have research animals at your house on the weekend of your wedding because it was so cold. That was a really cold winter.

[00:11:44] Dr. Saczawa: Yes, the pipes burst in the building. My behaviorism course, it includes a rat lab. We train the rats to press levers and run mazes and whatever the students want to choose to teach them to do. Some of them teach them to play soccer. Some of them teach them to finger paint. Some of them teach them to ride skateboards. I have little tiny rat-sized skateboards in my lab as well as little tiny rat clothes.

[00:12:10] Gretchen: Maybe I need one of those for the two clowns that are here in my office.

[00:12:17] Dr. Saczawa: It got really cold right before my wedding and the pipes burst. I couldn’t leave the rats here. They didn’t have heat. They didn’t have water. It was right after Christmas. The day after Christmas on December 26th, I had to drive up to campus and take 18 rats. I had to pile 18 rats into my car and drive them and set them up in my basement three days before my wedding. That was fun.

[00:12:53] Gretchen: Flexibility is a sign of intelligence, right?

[00:12:56] Dr. Saczawa: Yes. I will tell you that being a college professor is a lot of fun, especially as someone who is neurodivergent. I love digging deep into tasks, into different subject areas, and sharing that information, just info dumping on people. That’s my entire job. I’ll have a student who says, “Hey, I want to do a project on this thing.” I say,”Yay, we get to go down a rabbit hole together again.” We get to have a lot of fun with it.

[00:13:29] Gretchen: That’s awesome. What has surprised you most about this career path? What did you not expect that has delighted you?

[00:13:40] Dr. Saczawa: Honestly, never expected to enjoy teaching. I never expected to want to be a teacher. As I mentioned, my mom was a librarian. Before that, she had been a classroom teacher. She was a high school math teacher, and then she was a K-12 art teacher. Then she moved to just elementary art. Then she became a librarian. We like to joke that she still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up.

[00:14:07] Gretchen: Which is why we get along so famously. That’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

[00:14:16] Dr. Saczawa: I had seen one of the things that she had struggled a lot with is a lot of the bureaucracy and the paperwork that went with being a public school teacher. Having to deal with the restrictions and not being able to follow those passions of sharing this information and things like that, she ended up having to do so much other stuff other than teaching. I knew I don’t want to be a teacher. That’s not what I want to do. My graduate program required us to teach one semester. We were required to be the instructor of records, to be primary instructor, not a TA or teaching assistant or anything like that.

The primary, the main one in the classroom, delivering the lectures, all of that for one semester. I figured that I would go in, I would do my one semester of teaching, and then I’d just go back to researching and being a TA. I got in there and I fell in love with it. I was required to do my one semester. I did three semesters that year. I did fall, winter, and summer. Then I continued on. Most graduate students typically teach one course, at most two. I think I ended up teaching four different courses. I ended up doing intro developmental research methods and neuroscience. I ended up teaching all of them.

[00:15:51] Gretchen: I remember your mom telling me that. I was like, how is she ever going to get out of grad school if she has all of these things on her plate?

[00:16:00] Dr. Saczawa: My advisor did put her foot down at one point and say, “You have to stop teaching. You have to graduate.” I just fell in love with it. I saw being at University of Florida, being one of those big research institutions, that I didn’t love– I love doing research, but I didn’t love the pressure of being at a big research institution. We have this phrase, publish or perish. This idea that if you are not publishing multiple articles a year, which each one of those is practically a full-time job. Each article probably takes three to six months of diligent work to put out.

If you’re not publishing multiple papers per year and bringing in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in grant funding, you’re not going to get tenure. You’re not going to be able to keep your job. That’s not what I wanted. I knew that the small liberal arts education design was what I wanted, where I could really emphasize on teaching, focus on teaching, focus on the students, and engaging with them and learning about them so that I could tie things more to their interests and help them keep that information longer, and then do some research on the side as well.

[00:17:22] Gretchen: You flipped the script, and instead of making research the emphasis, it is the codicil to your endeavors, which is interesting. When we were getting ready, you said something I didn’t expect you to say, which is that now you’re collaborating to update a statistics manual. What you said was, “I love statistics.” I never thought I’d hear somebody say that. Expecting that to perhaps come from a Saczawa doesn’t surprise me because you all are so math-oriented. I could still probably get in touch with the hives I had in the two semesters of statistics I had to take for my degree. Tell us a little bit about that. Why do you love teaching statistics?

[00:18:18] Dr. Saczawa: Like you said, I do come from a very math-oriented family. I remember one year we were coming home from Christmas Eve service, and my older brother was teaching us how to count in hexadecimal. That’s what we were doing. Instead of base 10, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then jumping up to the next series, counting in hexadecimal, which is 16. Counting. That was what we did after Christmas Eve service on the way home because we’re a bunch of nerds.

As I mentioned, I love statistics now. I hated statistics as an undergrad. I double-majored in neuroscience and psychology as an undergrad. The psychology major required us to take statistics and research methods. The neuroscience major did not, which as a neuroscientist who does a lot of statistics, I think that is incorrect. Emory will do whatever it wants.

[00:19:22] Gretchen: That seems so odd.

[00:19:24] Dr. Saczawa: Yes. The neuroscience program there was a lot more focused on small end designs, which means small sample sizes. You don’t do statistics with those typically. When you only have five people, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about means and standard deviations. You need to look at individual values. My undergraduate psychology degree, I had to take statistics, and I absolutely hated it. It was so bad that I didn’t want to take the second half of the sequence, and I dropped my psychology major. I hated it.

I never wanted to take statistics again. I knew that in grad school I would have to take some and I was dreading it. I get into statistics in grad school and I discover I love it. I absolutely fell in love with it. The reason was that in my undergraduate statistics course, we were focusing so much on the formulas and doing things by hand and calculating everything by hand. There are different formulas. We talk about definitional formulas and computational formulas.

The definitional formula makes sense conceptually, but it’s a lot harder to do because, for example, if you’re talking about the average and the standard deviation, for the standard deviation, using the definitional formula, it makes much more sense when you go through each step, but you’re having to square values, you’re having to take the square root of a large value.

It’s harder to do by hand, whereas the computational formula is much more straightforward in terms of the math that you have to do, but it doesn’t make as much sense of what the value means. In my undergraduate course, we were having to calculate things by hand. We were having to do these really advanced statistics by hand and show our work the whole way through. We’re using these computations–

[00:21:26] Gretchen: With one of these things, a pencil, right? Yes.

[00:21:29] Dr. Saczawa: I once got points taken off because I used Excel to calculate the average before I did the standard deviation. I was supposed to show my work for the average the whole way through, even though we had already passed the section on calculating the average. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve proven that I can do this part. Now let me use the shortcut.” I got points–

[00:21:54] Gretchen: I still had to do it the long way with, as my kids call it, the stubby pencil.

[00:22:00] Dr. Saczawa: Yes. When I got to graduate school, however, the emphasis was much more on using the tools that we have, using these computer programs where we can put the data in. It’s about, rather than learning how to calculate the formulas, it’s learning which statistics we use in which situation and how we interpret those, what it means. If we’re doing, for instance, a regression, how do we use a B weight versus a standardized beta weight?

What do they mean? Why are both of them useful in different ways? I knew that when I was teaching statistics that was what I wanted to do. I’ve actually been working with this textbook author. He and I met through Zoom about this time last year, probably, to talk about it because I said, “Hey, this book is great. It uses a different computer program than we do. Would you be willing to update it for this?” He said, “I don’t have time, but you can do it.” I said, “Cool, let’s do it.” I am–

[00:23:05] Gretchen: Great. More work, right? You’re not busy enough.

[00:23:10] Dr. Saczawa: I’m taking the framework that he already has and just updating some of the screenshots and things like that for this other computer program. One of the things that we talked about in that conversation was we both agreed that these computational formulas are dumb. They were useful at one point, but now they actually cause more confusion because they’re using mathematical shortcuts, but it actually makes it so that you lose the real concept of what it means, what the standard deviation means, what a correlation means.

I had my students do these steps in Excel. I have each step, I have my worksheet set up so that they have to do each individual step and see how that fits together, see what these outcome values actually mean, and how the individual data points are contributing to that outcome value. That makes a lot more sense down the road when they’re applying this to their research.

[00:24:16] Gretchen: You’ve got them doing the quantitative calculations, but you also have them getting the conceptual understanding so that they can see why they have to apply a certain calculation in a certain situation, which is brilliant. That’s pretty amazing. What’s your favorite course that you teach? Are you going to tell me it’s statistics?

[00:24:38] Dr. Saczawa: Statistics right now is my favorite. I love teaching research methods largely because that is where I get to be the most creative. For a long time, I did not consider myself to be a creative person, which is funny if you know me, because, again, my mom was an art teacher, which actually that was probably part of the problem because I was a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist and having your mom as your art teacher does not go well together.

[00:25:10] Gretchen: No, it doesn’t sound like it.

[00:25:12] Dr. Saczawa: Yes. You know how stubborn I can be.

[00:25:17] Gretchen: I wasn’t going to say anything about that.

[00:25:20] Dr. Saczawa: I like to joke that if they didn’t want me to be a contrarian, they should not have sang Mary quite contrary to me my entire life. Not my fault.

[00:25:31] Gretchen: That is very true.

[00:25:33] Dr. Saczawa: I realized when I was in college that my creativity comes out actually in the form of coming up with research questions. If you give me any object, I can come up with multiple research questions for it. It was really interesting seeing the first time I taught research methods, that this is not a common thing for people to just be able to come up with ideas off the top of their head. That’s really where a lot of my creativity comes out. I’m able to use that and help students.

They say, “I want to understand more about this concept.” I say, “Okay, we can go this direction, we can go this direction, we can go this direction, we can go this completely different related direction.” I have a lot of fun with that one. Then the other one that– I really love my neuroscience course, my neuropsychology course, which is better term biological psychology, but that’s the whole thing. It’s really introducing students to this concept of neuroscience and getting them to see the science behind psychology. A lot of times, people think of psychology as being a soft science or a social science. It does blur those lines. At my college here, we are part of the natural sciences division.

All of our upper-level classes and many of our lower-level classes as well, actually have labs, just like you would get with biology or chemistry or things like that because we understand the importance of this hands-on learning and gathering that information through application and really being able to solidify those concepts through repetitive practice. Applying them to their everyday lives. I really love that one. Then my learning class is fun just because we get to play with the rats a lot.

[00:27:30] Gretchen: Of course, I have rats because I threw a challenge to Shelby, who’s a little bit younger than you are, when she was 10, and she wanted to pet rat. My thought was over my dead body. I said, “Go read every book on pocket pets, write me a paper, and then we’ll talk.” 20 years later, I still have rats. She’s a biological researcher who no longer works with rats, but at one point did. You just don’t know where you’re going to end up, do you? Help me understand how your students come to you. Do they come to you and say, “I’m gung-ho. I want to major in psychology,” or do they come to you going, “Psychology seems interesting.” Then they catch your enthusiasm.

[00:28:23] Dr. Saczawa: A bit of both. Most of the students that come to me saying, “I want to do psychology,” I would say most of them come in with some preexisting experience or interest in psychology, whether that is because they heard a podcast that was interesting or, in a lot of cases, has some experience with people with psychological issues. Of some sort, whether that is they have ADHD, or a friend had depression, or I’ve had students with neurological deficits, or who had, “Oh, I had this brain injury when I was a kid, and I’m really interested now that I see, I’m interested in learning more about how that made me the person that I am today.”

Again, a lot of it becomes research is me-search. Then I end up with a fair number of students, especially in my intra-psych class, who come in because they are interested in another major, they had planned on another major, and they realized that psychology still applies to them. One of the activities that I tend to do in my Intro Psych class the very first day, is I have them– most of them are first-year students.

I usually have a few sophomores, juniors, seniors, and I have them introduce themselves to their neighbor, and then talk in a small group of four or five students about what is your major or what are you planning on majoring in? Or what are you planning on doing after college, if you have some idea of that yet? See if you can come up with a way that psychology applies to you. It’s really interesting seeing them teasing out.

A lot of students come in because this is a general education requirement. It seems they think it’s going to be pretty easy, and so why not just take interest? A lot of them end up with an appreciation. The pretty straightforward ones, I get students in education, okay, yes, I understand how psychology is useful. Business students, yes, because marketing is just social psychology with a bigger budget. We see a lot of things like that. One of the most common ones where I have students saying, ”No, I can’t figure out how psychology is going to relate to me,” are in math and physics.

I’m like, ”Okay, let’s talk about dyscalculia. Let’s talk about how we conceptually understand math and how we learn math, how we understand it. We’re going to talk a lot about psychophysics, so the actual physics of sensation and perception. We’re going to talk about, I had to learn electrical physics for neurobiology to understand how neurons work and how the electrical signals are passed.”

I like to show them different ways that these things are going to apply to them. Even if your major has nothing to do with psychology, this course is still going to be useful. I end up with a fair number of students who are double majoring because they’ve seen, ”Oh, I’m planning on majoring in business. It would probably be really helpful for me to understand the way people work well and things like that.

[00:32:02] Gretchen: Help me understand as a neuropsychologist, for our audience members who maybe don’t understand the differences between a general psychology major and a developmental psychology, that was what my degree is in, and that in $5 will get me a cheap cup of coffee at Starbucks. Help our audience understand some of the differences.

[00:32:30] Dr. Saczawa: Basically, if you can think of some other area, there is a way that you can tie psychology to it. Some of the major breakdown areas are going to be developmental psychology, which my developmental program was a lifespan development. We were looking across the lifespan. We’re looking at physical development. We’re looking at cognitive development. We’re looking at social development. We’re looking at all of these different pieces, including how people change in adulthood.

I’m actually getting ready to start a study with a student now looking at how during perimenopause, how estrogen levels changing during perimenopause can affect the way that ADHD medications work, and how well those medications work based on hormone levels, and how those hormone levels change during perimenopause and menopause. Developmental is going to be looking at changes and stability across the lifespan. That’s developmental. We can look at social psychology, which is basically our interactions with other people, how we influence others, how others influence us, including how others influence us even when no one else is around.

Have you ever tried to stand in an elevator facing the back wall with your back to the doors? It’s very uncomfortable. This is social psychology. Cognitive psychology is the area of understanding the way that we think, so attention and decision-making and memory, and things like that. That’s a lot of those internal processes that are going on. Related to that is going to be biological psychology. Biological psychology, sometimes referred to as psychobiology or neuropsychology, or behavioral neuroscience, has a lot of different names, is really looking at the brain. We look at brain chemistry. We look at brain anatomy. We look at connections between different parts of the brain.

We also look at how medications change things. We look at genetics and how genetics influence these different processes in the brain. In fact, you might be able to see I have a giant slinky back here. I use that giant slinky to teach genetics when I teach about the genetics of psychology, if there’s a whole thing for epigenetics. Then we can look at clinical psychology, which is probably clinical or counseling psychology. This is the area that most people are probably most familiar with. This is looking at disorders and treatments, and things like that.

We can look at personality psychology, which is social psychology, abnormal psychology, looking at personality, what contributes to our personality. Behaviorism oftentimes falls under the umbrella of neuroscience or cognitive psychology. It’s ironic that it gets lumped in with cognitive psychology because the really intense, the original behaviorist absolutely hated cognitive psychology and said that it wasn’t scientific because we couldn’t measure it. B.F. Skinner did not like cognitive psychology.

[00:35:58] Gretchen: I was about to say, oh, so now we’re talking about Skinnerian psychology because he was really opposed to that.

[00:36:06] Dr. Saczawa: Yes. John Watson, Rosalie Rainer, B.F. Skinner, they did not like cognitive psychology. A lot of times, behaviorism gets lumped in there with that.

[00:36:15] Gretchen: Isn’t it also true that we have so much more insight into behavioral psychology now than Skinner, Watson, and all of them had?

[00:36:28] Dr. Saczawa: You’ve probably picked up on, a lot of these areas are intertwined. Modern behaviorism accepts that we have to measure some cognition. There are mental processes that we are missing a major piece of the picture if we ignore everything and only measure what we can see from the outside. Modern behaviorism is largely cognitive. There’s a lot of overlap there. You’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of overlap with a lot of these areas. I talk about neuroscience as being the chemistry of the brain and how that affects behavior, but I was also talking about neuroscience in terms of developmental psychology and how the brain changes across development.

We can look at how brain changes. We have the whole area of social neuroscience, so the way that the brain contributes to social interactions and how changes in the brain can lead to differences in social interactions. A lot of what I do is biological psychopathology, so understanding the biology, the neuroscience behind psychological disorders. Then that leaves out an entire area that I haven’t mentioned yet, which is industrial and organizational psychology or business psychology.

This is HR management. A lot of people in I.O. or business psychology are in HR and human resources, but a lot of it is really based on how do we get people to be motivated? How do you make good leaders? How do you communicate effectively? How do you make people the most effective and happiest people they can be? That’s how you’re going to get good workers. It’s like the good cheese comes from happy cows. Good product comes from happy employees. That is [unintelligible 00:38:26].

[00:38:28] Gretchen: When we construct our booths at conferences, the way we place tables is based on the industrial psychology of being welcoming to invite people into your booth to have a conversation with you. Things that people would not normally think have anything to do with it really have a lot to do with it.

[00:38:55] Dr. Saczawa: I actually have a friend who has a master’s degree in human-computer interaction. It is a human factors psychology. It’s an area of psychology that falls under sometimes industrial, organizational, sometimes under biological and cognitive. We used to have a human factors psychologist here who helped develop the cockpits in airplanes to make them more user-friendly for pilots. What color an LED is on the dashboard is going to affect based on how well your eyes see different kinds of colors. This is why in cockpits, they’re not going to have any bright blue LEDs, because bright blue light is going to make your pupils constrict. If it is dark out, if a pilot is flying out at night, you don’t want them looking at a bright blue LED and the pupils constricting, and then they can’t see.

[00:39:53] Gretchen: You don’t need them squinting in the cockpit.

[00:39:56] Dr. Saczawa: Exactly. This is why those really bright blue LED headlights are such a pain if you’re driving at night, because your pupils constrict, and then you can’t see as soon as the car passes you. There are a lot of areas. My friend with a master’s in human-computer interaction, she helps design apps and websites in order to make them more user-friendly. She helps with font choices and color choices, and where menus should go and things like that in order to increase the usability of websites and app.

[00:40:30] Gretchen: The engagement they’re in, because if you can get somebody to stay, then they’re going to interact more positively. Mary, tell me, how does your chosen field give you insight as a neurodiverse person, give you insight into Mary as a neurodiverse person?

[00:40:51] Dr. Saczawa: Oh, it has really helped a lot for me, and I will also totally out my kids right now. I have three stepkids, and two of them have ADHD diagnoses. It has actually been very helpful to be able to have the language to explain, this is what’s happening, both for myself and for them. We could say, ”Okay, you are having a really hard time right now. You were doing really well all day. You’re having a really hard time because your Adderall wore off, your dopamine wore off. You don’t have dopamine, so you’re sneaking it out. You are trying to find a way to feel better, and you’re having a hard time because of that.”

With a lot of people, this is not for everyone, helping to label those things makes life much easier because then I know, for me, I got my ADHD diagnosis when I was 34. I already had my doctorate. I had worked at two colleges full-time. I was at my third full-time teaching position when I got my diagnosis of ADHD. I had already done my dissertation and everything. I was 55. Just white-knuckled my way through all of graduate school. It’s really helpful for me to understand what’s going on. As I mentioned, the research on perimenopause and ADHD symptoms comes from my own experience and talking to friends and to colleagues about our symptoms.

Then I was able to go digging of why would it be certain times we’re seeing these waves, these ups and downs? I understand about the different chemistry involved and the hormones involved, I can see, ”Oh, dopamine requires estrogen to work. When my estrogen levels are low, even the medication’s not going to work very well because it can’t actually work in the brain without that estrogen.”

[00:42:58] Gretchen: That’s interesting you should say that. I got my perimenopause diagnosis and my ADHD diagnosis the same year. Mary, what would your closing words be?

[00:43:09] Dr. Saczawa: I would say closing advice is just try to keep things fun and keep things novel. Keep in mind that you are always learning and that learning is a lifelong process. You can learn as much from others as they can learn from you. To keep that fun and to try and keep that creativity and that drive for information going.

[00:43:33] Gretchen: Wonderful. Mary, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. I’m going to conclude and conclude the webinar now. I have to tell you, this surpassed my expectations beyond the pale. Of course, I knew it would, but it’s been so much fun to spend the last hour with you. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been amazing.

[00:43:52] Dr. Saczawa: Thank you so much for having me. Thanks.

[00:43:53] Gretchen: Take care. Bye-bye.

[00:43:54] Dr. Saczawa: Bye.

[00:43:55] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demilearning.com forward slash show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

[music]