What's so great about neuroscience?

Last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.  I got to stay with Graceheart, which was good because I needed the support, and she’s a pro at support, especially when it involves letting me feel yucky feelings.  Yucky feelings there were a-plenty. 

Right now I feel stuck.  The projects that I’ve worked on up until now, that I’m presently trying to finish up aren’t compelling to me.  When I look at them, I think something like, “Why would anybody want to devote part of their life to understanding THAT?”  Those projects are taking up most of my mental bandwidth right now.  The research that I’m more interested in right now, that I could see myself working on in a post doc, is not what I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about over the last month.  I was describing this to Graceheart’s flatmate, when she asked me why I got into this field in the first place.  I could not think of any compelling reason.  This is what I find most disheartening: being at a conference with 28,000 other people who think that neuroscience is the most amazing thing under the sun.  I do not think that neuroscience is the most amazing thing under the sun.  To be fair, I know that I’ve been on a downswing in my mood (I’ve got a bi-polar mood disorder, which means that I get depressed and also more than just ‘un-depressed’.).  So I’m trying not to buy into these feelings of carelessness too heavily.  Nevertheless, I have a hard time not interpreting the contrast, which is So High, between how I feel and the energy I’m getting from so many other people as a message about my fitness to be a scientist.  

As I write that it occurs to me that I’m judging my worth or potential as a scientist based upon feeling like I belong among other scientists.  Something that I value about myself (when I’m not busy being insecure about it), is that I don’t see things the way many other people do.  From that perspective, my divergence from the norms of scientific culture is what qualifies me to contribute to the field.  That’s hard to sell to other people, especially those doing the hiring and funding, in a field that is sometimes obstinately conservative.  But I’m not so much looking for what to tell other people.  I’m trying to understand my internal motivation for pursuing this arduous path of training.

In the Shambhala tradition we have a mnemonic/pedagogical device called 'threefold logic’, which can be broken down as either, ground-path-fruition or view-practice-action.  There's a sort of progression from subtle principle to overt manifestation.  As an example, let’s say you’d like to do an oil painting.  You have the feeling or concept that you’d like to express, which is the view, then you have your plan for the composition, which is the practice, and you have the actual execution, applying paint to the canvas, which is the action.  Let me be the first to say that I am pretty new as a generator of threefold logics, though I’ve been studying them in various forms for about 4 years now.  I feel like right now, I’m trying to articulate the view of my life as a scientist.  My sense is that there is a view implicit in the field of neuroscience, which is not the view that I personally am basing my life on.  The view of the field seems to be that the world is a hostile and confusing place and that as a scientist you need to prove yourself competent, innovative and insightful.  It’s a culture of constantly proving yourself worthy; any mistake or shortcoming could reveal your unworthiness.  Doubt, in general, doesn’t have to be justified, it’s the sensible default.  The view that I’m trying to hold is that the world is an accommodating place, actually completely sacred, and that I already have all everything I need to be successful at the most basic level.  All that’s left for me to do is trust that completeness.  

That view of basic completeness rings true for me, but questions arise as well.  Scientists can be and have been wrong in the past about a lot of things.  Doesn’t that mean that we need to work hard to be ‘less wrong’?  If I’m already complete, why do I need to go through this rigorous training process?  Some people try to become scientists and fail.  If they had everything that they needed, why didn’t they succeed?  If skepticism is in the fabric of doing science, how can I hold a view that I’m inherently trustworthy?