Peer Pressure from Scientific Fundamentalists?

I was impressed to read this morning that Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, had publicly criticized Richard Dawkins for his anti-religious "fundamentalism" ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/26/peter-higgs-richard-dawkins-fundamentalism ).

One of his points is that fundamentalism -- belief in anything that cannot be changed by data -- is an anti-scientific position, even if the belief held so strongly is belief in the superiority of science and the inferiority of faith.

Dr. Higgs is on the "short list" at Stockholm, given the recent discovery that his predicted particle exists, so right now he has a lot of power in the world of science. I am impressed that he chose to spend some of that power defending scientists who have spiritual beliefs, even though he himself is not among them.

At least in the U.S., there is astounding peer pressure among scientists to keep secret any spiritual beliefs or experiences we have. The underlying concern, I think, is that we fear that our colleagues (and maybe we ourselves) believe that rational/rigorous scientific thought cannot exist in the same brain as irrational/unfiltered spiritual belief. Either you're a rational scientist or an irrational spiritualist, but you can't be both. Choose one, and that position invalidates the other.

I have a suspicion that this false dichotomy is related to a similar one that is prevalent throughout professions beyond science -- the care-taking/productivity dichotomy. One can either be a care-taker who kindly and compassionately helps people with their problems regardless of whether the solution is productive (aka, mom), or one can be a problem solver who incisively and resolutely solves problems productively regardless of whether the solution is kind (aka, dad). However, it's apparent to anyone who knows someone simultaneously incisive, productive, and compassionate that this is a false dichotomy as well. The soft can co-exist in the same mind with the hard, and the outcome is best when it does.

Our minds have so many modes, and while sometimes a single mode is clearly the one that is controlling the show at the present moment, at other times it is apparent that multiple modes are sharing the load. Our fears about multiple mind-sets co-existing are based on a false assumption that a single mode must win each day or else chaos will ensue. Of course, such an arrangement would be exhausting for whatever mode wins the day. Not only would it be exhausting, it wouldn't match with the empirical evidence that multiple neural modules co-exist and co-lead our sense of self and our behaviors (see, for instance, Richard Thaler's economics theories, or Paul Bloom's review in The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/first-person-plural/307055/ ).

It's one of my greatest daily pleasures to wake up, consciously connect myself to God/the Universe/Spirit/Whatever you want to call it, and then try to figure out the most rigorous way to analyze my data and the most accurate way to interpret it. Sometimes I even ask the Universe for help in this process. So I guess I just want to say I'm grateful to Peter Higgs for bringing the idea of a spiritualist scientist into the mainstream.

What works and what doesn't, and why?

There's been a bit of a media frenzy about our recent meta-analysis (see a summary article on the paper that I wrote for the International Human Press: http://ithp.org/articles/canwepredictthefuture.html ). After all the excitement died down, however, I found myself wanting more. Like a drug that I'd unwittingly learned to love, I wanted more of the satisfaction that is admittedly very rare in a scientific career -- for one's ideas to be seen by many other scientists and to be considered seriously.

Fortunately, I was weaned relatively quickly. I received two harsh reviews on two different papers, and one of my favorite results about a gender difference in perception looks like it is not replicating.

There have been some things that worked over the past few weeks: another gender difference looks like it is replicating, I had a blast giving two talks up at King's College University in London, Ontario, and a call with an intellectual property expert made me realize one of my ideas may be marketable.

This "best of times, worst of times" mix has made me start thinking about what tends to work, what tends to not work, and why. Here are my musings.

What works: It seems to me that whatever ends up working is a "sleeper" project. Projects that I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, that I've consciously ignored for awhile and then finally did the work -- these are the ones that end up working. It's like my subconscious chews on them for long enough to spit out a useful approach that makes the project work.

What doesn't work: Projects that I concentrate a lot of conscious mental energy on tend to fall through eventually. Really, it seems that the harder I concentrate on something, the more likely it is to fall through. The meta-analysis, for example, took a few years of hard work, but it was a background project that barely grazed the surface of my work life. Meanwhile, my gender difference that isn't replicating was the star of my conscious repertoire of cool things I've done.

Why? Of course, asking my conscious mind to answer this one will give some answers, none of which should be taken seriously, because they won't be correct (see observations above). My best guess is that the subconscious mind is more efficient when it gets more material to chew on, and is left alone and not nagged for answers so that it can provide answers when it is ready. When my conscious mind gets over-invested and over-involved, it makes decisions that are not based on all the data that is being processed by my subconscious. In general, it appears my subconscious knows best.

Does yours?

The Questions Themselves

I published a paper last week with two co-authors, Patrizio Tressoldi at University of Padova in Italy and Jessica Utts at University of California at Irvine. It's gained a lot of media attention because the results suggest that our bodies can anticipate upcoming emotional events without any external clues. Of course there must be an explanation for this phenomenon, but my co-authors and I don't know what it is; it's possible that there is a rather un-interesting explanation, but we rule out those explanations in the analysis, at least as far as we can tell. I go into details about the possible un-interesting explanations in my paper (visit this page to download it), so I don't want to discuss them here. The remaining explanations are all fairly interesting -- such as quantum biological processes and retrocausal effects. However, the upshot is that we found a highly significant effect that is very mysterious, given the everyday assumption that causes precede their effects.

As a scientist, it's pretty rare to get media attention. It feels good that ABC 20/20 and the Wall Street Journal seem to care about my work, or at least the results of my work. But this morning, as I watched the paper climb to the top of the heap in terms of media mentions for the particular journal in which it is published (Frontiers in Perception Science), I realized that I feel a completeness I've never felt before in my work, and it is only partly the short-term high of media attention.

I feel like if I die now, I know I have changed the world for the better. It's not that my research is so amazing that it changes the world for the better in itself. It is that in this paper we present a mysterious finding that seems very robust, yet it is still mysterious. We don't have a good handle on how to explain it. It's remarkable to see such acclaim and publicity around a question, not an answer. That momentary celebration of not knowing is a big gift to myself and others, and a good reminder of all we don't know.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves," Rilke wrote. Loving the questions is the secret beauty in the scientific process. It's secret because the way science is taught suggests that scientists love answers, not questions. But anyone who actually becomes a scientist does so because that person is driven by a question that they love. The feeling is mutual; it seems that the question clings tenaciously as well, throughout your life. For me, the question is, "what is the nature of time?"

I want to freeze this moment, before answers are given to address this particular mystery. I want to appreciate this public celebration of wonder and strangeness, without answers. My completeness comes from knowing I made the point that I most enjoy making -- mystery is real, it is awesome, and when questions are loved well, they will eventually, if they like, yield answers.

The Four Corners Meditation

"All things have one root."
--Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

Just before I left for Yom Kippur services at Mishkan this morning, I sat down in front of my computer to submit an application for yet another faculty position. Even though I knew it was Yom Kippur, I told myself that I had to do it today -- yesterday a friend had already contacted her friends on the search committee at that university to tell them nice things about me. I was afraid that her words would be forgotten by the time the committee received my application, unless I submitted the application online today. There was also a big part of me that thought with no accompanying irony, "They're scientists. They won't understand if I wait until after Yom Kippur."

They're scientists; they won't understand.

Like in all other Yom Kippur services, we said the Shema prayer, in which we affirm God's unity. But we prepared for the affirmation by doing a brief meditation that brought to light exactly how my thought process this morning had failed both me and the school to which I'd sent my application. The Rabbi asked us to take the four corners of our prayer shawls and bring them together to hold in one hand. She said this was meant to remind us of the disparate parts of ourselves, the parts that seem to be opposing one another but nonetheless co-exist. Her point was that each of these parts are a facet of the gem of ourselves, reflecting God. These parts are not struggling to be resolved, the "best" ones eventually overtaking their opposites. Instead, they are meant to to form a messy unity inside of us.

I am a scientist. Do I understand?

Do I understand how I can feel so open-hearted toward God and also enjoy working in a field that reduces God to seizures in the temporal lobe? Do I understand how I can be skeptical about post-hoc analyses and not blink an eye when the Rabbi discusses with us what God "wants?" Do I understand how I can be annoyed with other scientists who have faith in outdated methods and at the same time, sure, let's read Torah?

Nope. I don't understand any of that, and the meditation didn't help.

What I did understand during my four-corners-of-ourselves meditation is that I have been dreaming of being a research scientist, a tenured professor, since I was ten years old. When I was ten, I imagined myself in a lab coat, walking around lab benches, checking my work. Everything was in its place, including my identity as a talented and insightful scientist. Of course, in those fantasies I was male. What else? I did say research scientist, right?

That image came back to me during my meditation -- the image of myself as a research scientist, and my assumption, even present at ten years old, that if I wanted this dream to come true, I'd have to be a radically different person. There was something not quite right about a female kind of person being a scientist. So I tweaked the image a bit and it fit. Sort of.

But of course it didn't, and it still doesn't. It's not that being a research scientist doesn't fit, that's perfect for me. I love the interplay with the mysteries of the universe, faith and non-stop empiricism all in one. What doesn't fit is the need to hide all the stuff I thought I had to hide in order to get a job. It's the other three corners of my prayer shawl.

I'm a woman, I'm open-hearted with God, and I'm so so flawed. By hiding those parts -- actually some of the best parts of me -- I've fallen into the trap set by my 10-year old self. That 10-year old didn't know any better, but I do now. It's terrifying, but it's finally clear to me that the job I end up getting by presenting my whole self to some fortunate search committee is the job that I'll keep, love, and excel at for a very long time.

Lessons taught by science and absorbed oh so slowly...

I was 24 and in my third year of the Neuroscience graduate program at U. California, San Francisco. Attending my first international conference, I was staying in a hotel on an island in the Netherlands. My roommate was an experienced psychology researcher. She was in her 60s or 70s, but I just knew I was better than she was. In so many ways.

First, she moved slowly. She didn't make decisions quickly, wasn't quick to speak or quick to judge. It took her some lounging time in the room to decide which talks to attend. Hah! I already knew the answer. All of them!

Second, she was soft. I could see the lack of muscle tone in her face and body. She moved gracefully, like a dancer, and she didn't necessarily seem to want to get where she was going any faster than she wanted to leave her original spot. She smiled a lot, laughed easily. She deeply underestimated, it seemed to me, the seriousness of it all. The Importance of Science. What a waste!

Third and most damning, she believed in observational research. The one thing I remember her saying to me with any seriousness was her response to my statement that so many of the talks seemed to lack hypotheses and were merely "fishing expeditions" -- a derogatory phrase I'd copied from my mentors at UCSF. She looked at me patiently and said in what must have been a well-measured tone, "My dear, exploratory research is under-rated. You will discover that for yourself someday." At that moment, one part of me looked at her in disgust and dismissed her entirely. Another part, much less stupid, held onto the wisdom and wondered if she was right.

Of course, she was right. Not only about exploratory research, but about all three flaws my earlier self spotted in her. Taking her time, being vulnerable, and observing. Of course. All three traits describe many Nobel laureates in science as well as many un-sung heroes in the academic world. They are traits that allow you to see what is before you and to choose a useful experiment that can help you discover something new.

This post is dedicated to my wise and very patient roommate, may she rest in peace.

What are we afraid of?

I just returned from having lunch with a wonderful friend of mine, Rebecca Armstrong. She's a minister and a counselor, and she's teaching a class at a local university about how our thoughts and feelings affect our bodies. Because I'm giving a guest lecture for her class, we thought we'd better meet to discuss the details of the course.

She told me a hilarious story about how a high-level administrator at this university didn't want the class to go forward, because he said, "This idea that feelings affect our bodies is ridiculous." I practically peed my pants when she told me this. It's as if he had said, "I put no stock into this idea that we breathe air." He didn't want students learning the heretical theory that feelings matter physiologically, even though of course it's empirically the case that they do, and there's nothing really controversial about those results.

After recovering from the giggling fit, I started to wonder...what's going on for this guy? What's his fear about? It had to be fear, right? Otherwise, he'd just shrug his shoulders and say, "I don't believe that's real, but there's a lot of things out there I don't believe." No, he couldn't do that. He was clearly threatened by the class -- therefore afraid of something.

What was he afraid of?

I started to think about how for me, my conscious/verbal mind is the one that decides most of what I do. It lays claim to my day: these are my plans, these are my goals, these are my backup plans. It does a lot of work, and it deserves to get a lot of credit. I give it a lot of credit, but it also wants more -- it wants me to say this to it: "You are all of me; or at least the most important part of me. There's nothing else here that matters. You are what drives this body and mind, friend. Go for it -- be the King of Me!"

Why does it want that that? If it were really confident -- for that matter, if my conscious/verbal brain were actually "all of me" and "the most important part" -- why would it need such reassurance?

What is it afraid of?

I think the university administrator and my verbal/conscious mind share the same fear. It's a fear of a stronger, more powerful, greater force that they both know is there: the subconscious.

I often feel that the conscious mind is not just lesser in size compared to the subconscious but also lesser in quality. There's plenty of evidence that the parts of the brain producing the subconscious dominate in size and operate more efficiently than the conscious mind. But I am also starting to believe that the subconscious is actually on the correct track more than the conscious mind. Not necessarily the rationally correct track but the evolutionarily adaptive track.

For instance, as Rebecca pointed out, in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast & Slow, he is very discouraged about the results of an experiment in which participants want to keep their hands in cold ice water for 30 seconds longer if their previous experience showed them for that last 30 seconds the water would get a tiny bit warmer. Their conscious/verbal minds aren't aware of this -- they say there's no difference over time in the temperature of the water. But when asked to repeat an experiment, they choose to repeat a 90-second ice-water experiment (in which they subconsciously experienced an increase in water temperature) rather than a 60-second ice-water experiment (in which the water didn't change temperature).

Why should this bother Kahneman so much? He doesn't like it because the subconscious seems to want to do the incorrect thing -- it wants to keep the body in danger longer -- but it is in control of us! It seems as if an ill-intentioned yet very powerful force is controlling our lives and endangering our bodies. This would be something to fear, indeed, but it's not true.

Of course keeping the hand in ice cold water for 30 seconds longer would seem like the incorrect decision to anyone's conscious mind. But the conscious and subconscious don't play by the same rules. The subconscious knows that even our subconscious feelings and stories about what happened -- "First the water was cold, then it got warmer, so it wasn't that bad" are more influential in our lives than what actually happened -- "I left my hand in the cold water for 30 seconds longer." Instead of the subconscious being a threat, it actually saves us, every day. It lets us have a good feeling about a situation (it got better) rather than a bad one (it was really cold the whole time), even when we don't know it's doing this for us.

I'm starting to think that the conscious mind is kind of like a kid standing beside a beautiful mountain and saying, "Everyone's looking at my pet ant! Come look at the ant with me! There is only the ant, right? I am angry you think there is anything else to look at! There's just me and the ant!"

Meanwhile, the mountain of the subconscious stands majestically soaring, quietly pointing out the obvious. There's a mountain here. It's pretty much the main point. It controls our attention and actions for a reason -- it's a frigging mountain, and it's going to help us survive. Of course it doesn't play by the rules made up by a child. Those are the rules of a child, after all.

So what are we afraid of? The subconscious is uncontrollable, mysterious, and beautiful. It doesn't give a whit about our egoic machinations to feel like there's an "us" in control. The subconscious is a radically feminist woman who is seen as very traditional. She runs her own business and never mentions it. She controls whatever commodity she sells by letting everyone else think they control it. She pulls the strings for an entire world of marionettes, but she's brilliantly woven the strings from spider thread. They're so thin, we think we control ourselves.

The soul of science...what is that?

I was eating watermelon at a colleague's house when I told my friend and her husband that I write a blog about finding the soul of science. Her husband who is also a scientist retorted laughingly, "There is no soul in science." I laughed as well, spit out some seeds, and we moved onto other topics.

On my way home I realized that I'm not really sure what I meant by "finding the soul of science." Was I talking about the idea that there's something animate in science that exists beyond scientists themselves, like the idea that a human soul exists beyond the lifetime of the human body?

Or was I thinking of the "warm and fuzzy part" of science -- the part that inspires hope, freedom, and joy? Maybe that's the same as the "groovy" part of science -- the part that stirs our emotions and makes us have fun telling jokes about neutrinos?

These last few ideas relate to the current colloquial use of "soul," which is why my friend's  husband made the joke that there is no soul in science -- no grooviness. Sometimes it feels that there is just competition, secrecy, analysis, and an old-boy's-network that favors the very few scientists who are allowed entry.

But the first idea -- the one about science itself having an animating force that can exist outside of the humans that do science -- that struck me as an interesting one. After all, art is done by artists, but after a generation of artists die, another generation does the work. It's as if art itself is a force that requires human attention and labor to bring itself to fruition. The soul of art could be called ART -- the force that brings art into being, generation after generation.

The soul of science, then, could be called SCIENCE -- the force that creates curiosity and single-minded pursuit of improved understanding of the universe. Sure, the trans-generational desire to do science can be partially explained by the consistent presence of brain circuits that pose questions and try to answer them using logically consistent evidence, circuits that are common to all humans with time on their hands and/or a need to solve problems. It can also be partially explained by cultural ideals that honor individuals who do such things (though these cultural ideals might only be extensions of the curious brain circuits).

But a metaphorical view is that scientists are doing a service for a larger force -- SCIENCE itself -- a force that, ironically, won't rest until we figure out what it's really made of. This description of the soul of science may not be accurate, but as most scientists know, accuracy is relative to what is known and what is possible, both of which change over time. What it lacks in accuracy, it makes up for in usefulness. There is nothing more useful than something to work towards that is larger than ourselves, as long as that thing is benevolent, reasonable, and bent on unveiling itself humbly over time.

Seeing Scientists

I'm at the Vision Sciences Society 2012 conference in Naples, Florida this week. The folks here are are interested in how the brain uses the eyes to see, and all the processes that go with seeing. There have been some really inspired talks and poster presentations, and there's a very juicy sense of both collaboration and competition.

Along with that, I've enjoyed noticing is the broad range of personalities that choose to go into science. Here's a photo of a few them. It's a bit blurry, but even from this photo it should be clear that scientists are not always robotic and drab. As a favorite mentor of mine once said, "There are as many ways to be a scientist as there are to be a human being."

The weird thing about the culture of science is that sometimes it feels like there's an expectation that we are all supposed to be robotic and drab. In other words, we can get tricked into feeling like we are supposed to be perfect. I definitely fall for this sometimes. If someone catches me making a mistake -- especially an intellectual one (not so much a social one, that happens too often among us scientists) -- I feel ashamed.

I was feeling that way yesterday, after a third long day of discussions with other scientists, during which I had failed to follow some of their ideas and/or I made false assumptions about their approaches. That evening, I was preparing to give a talk about some of my auditory-visual cognition work. About half an hour before the session, I met the moderator, Maggie Shiffrar. She's one of several strong and authentic women in science whose mere existence, from afar and without knowing it, has brought me through difficult times.

As delighted as I was to meet Dr. Shiffrar, I was too nervous to talk at length. But a bit later while I tested my laptop, I overheard her talking to the first speaker. He had a difficult name to pronounce, and I heard her tell him that he was free to call her "Dr. Shitfrar" if she messed up his name when she introduced him.

I think that interchange -- her acknowledgement of her own humanity and her willingness to be teased for it -- allowed me to relax and enjoy giving my talk, even when I made several mistakes.

So here's to my favorite thing about science: the scientists ourselves and our adorable, inevitably failing struggle not to be human. It's a struggle that's even more inspiring when it's out in the open for everyone to see.

Choosing carefully how you'll be a fool

“We're all fools...all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

I gave a guest lecture last week for a class at Northwestern called "Music and the Mind." I presented some recent results suggesting that music may influence working memory, and I discussed these new data with the students.

More importantly to me, I also spent some time talking with the kids about the dangers of believing in the currently accepted scientific "truths." They had just read an article in which the author had stated that the effects of music on cognition were only interesting if they were specific to music and not generalized effects of sensory stimulation. The rest of the paper was based on this assumption, but I wanted the students to question the assumption. Why would it not be interesting if sensory stimulation generally helped improve cognition? Isn't music a convenient form of sensory stimulation to use in that case? They understood and a few even became involved in helping me question my own assumptions.

After the class I began thinking that if we're lucky to live long enough, we're all bound to look like fools for something we've said or done (probably both). The essential question is, how do you want to be a fool? Do you want to be a fool for being too conservative and never considering new ideas? Do you want to be a fool for being too liberal and never questioning new ideas? Or do you want to be a fool for trying to take a middle path, then becoming emotionally caught up in one idea or another and espousing it as if it's a rational, rather than an emotional or subconscious, choice?

It seemed to me that these three are the basic options, and I didn't want to be a fool in any of those ways.

BUT then I was able to remember the ways I want to be a fool.
1) I want to be a fool for allowing my emotion and my subconscious to present intuitive ideas to my conscious mind, and to follow these ideas wherever they lead with rigor and openness.
2) I want to be a fool for admitting that it feels to me that the universe and I are in a relationship.
3) Finally, I want to be a fool for trying to use my relationship with the universe to discover more about the way consciousness works.

So it's worth asking: how do you want to be a fool?

 

Letting your actions inform you about your nature

My boyfriend's new book came out today (Clutter Busting Your Life: Clearing Physical and Emotional Clutter to Reconnect with Yourself and Others, New World Library). Although I helped edit the book and am intimately familiar with it, looking at the book in its final form was like seeing a newborn you've felt growing inside your partner's belly for the better part of a year.

Here's what compels me about Brooks's transformational philosophy: instead of trying to change who you are, he starts with what your actions tell him, and he uses that to inform all future decisions. As a clutter buster, he sees clients who are hoping to separate their crap from their treasures. A lot of them give themselves grief about buying things they never use (scrapbooks, crochet materials, even cars). His response is, essentially, "So you're not using that. Must not be that interesting to you after all. What do you like to do? I see your paints are well used. You must like painting. Let's make sure your paints have a place in your home."

Living with him, hearing his talks, and reading his books I've realized that there's so much pressure to try to make ourselves over but in fact we are usually just right the first time.

I have adopted his philosophy, and now I see that when I put off doing something it's because I don't really want to do it. I haven't put my photos in order for years. So what? I must not want to do that. There's plenty I don't put off: writing this blog, working on scientific papers, analyzing data, and taking care of my son. I must want to do those things.

By the Brooks Principle, my nature is NOT to be a person who enjoys putting photos in order. My nature IS to be someone who likes to write, do science, and be a mom.

Accepting where we are doesn't mean we can't stretch and change and grow, but it means we need to appreciate the messages that our actions (and inactions) are giving us. It means we can learn about ourselves, stop blaming ourselves for what we learn, and use that knowledge to continue to feed and nourish who we are.

Enjoying and Questioning the Consortium of Brains

I've spent the past few days at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting. I presented my data yesterday, and today I had the opportunity to hear talks and see poster presentations about things that interest me. But the best part of the conference has been the "chance" meetings in which I end up in conversations making connections between ideas I think I barely understand and those I'm sure I don't.

As frustrating as the world of science can be, one of the best things about it is that it's a group venture. The idealized view of a scientist as a smart person who thinks about stuff and does experiments and comes to conclusions...all alone in the lab...is a cultural hoax.

The reality is that even if a scientist physically works alone, s/he is always bouncing ideas off of other scientists, whether they're dead or alive. The community of scientists is really a community of ideas. A consortium of brains.

Today after having a bouncing-idea conversation with a new acquaintance at the conference, I found myself feeling grateful that I'm not working alone, and I never will. In a way, the output of the scientific community is like the processing of a big brain, with parts that specialize in certain areas and also communicate with other parts -- all so the giant beast in which this brain lives can go somewhere.

What is this giant beast? Where's the beast going? Good question. That's a question the scientific venture, thus far, has not been so great about answering. If I could predict the most important advance of science in the next century, I'd say it would be to understand where this venture is taking us, and why.

We must be on the wrong track...

The other day my post-doc adviser and I were chatting about our work. He was a bit concerned, he told me, because the work we're doing is accepted very easily (thus far) into the scientific mainstream. I said, "It's like we must be on the wrong track, right?" He nodded.

We both knew the history of scientific revolutions...when something really groundbreaking is discovered, it's not easily accepted. So as much as he and I both like getting papers into journals, that's not as satisfying, in a way, as work that gets shoved to the side because no one believes its true. Those kind of controversial topics are more fun. There's the possibility with that kind of work that there's something really remarkable (and true) that's been discovered.

I guess that's why I spend a little bit of time each week on my controversial scientific hobbies, which are basically high-risk, high-potential-gain projects. One is examining the possibility of the subconscious awareness of future events. Another is investigating how live musical performance seems to produce healing effects on our bodies. A third is about gender differences in perception and cognition.

One of my heroes is Barbara McClintock (photo above). She received the Nobel Prize for her work discovering a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. After reading a beautiful biography of Dr. McClintock (A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller), I began to fully appreciate the difficulty had by pioneers in any field.

Dr. McClintock was mocked by her colleagues because she spent what seemed to them an inordinate amount of time in cornfields. She studied corn genetics. Her explanation of her time spent with the plants was that she had to get to know her organisms, or how else would she understand them? Her colleagues also teased her for thinking that she could know, based on the patterns in generations of corn kernels, that genes could "jump."

Later in her life, she said this about the difficulties of making people understand an idea when the time isn't right:

"Over the years I have found that it is difficult if not impossible to bring to consciousness of another person the nature of his tacit assumptions when, by some special experiences, I have been made aware of them. This became painfully evident to me in my attempts during the 1950s to convince geneticists that the action of genes had to be and was controlled. It is now equally painful to recognize the fixity of assumptions that many persons hold on the nature of controlling elements in maize and the manners of their operation. One must await the right time for conceptual change."

Reading this, I feel better about the recent rejection of a paper about one of my more controversial hobbies. I don't know when the right time is for conceptual change in this case, but I'll keep doing my hobby experiments -- the fun, high-risk kind -- until the time is ripe.

Intuition: The Internal Oracle

This morning I'm sitting in front of a computer, watching a recording of brainwaves move across the monitor. While I was checking for eye blinks and muscle twitches -- events that can mess up the recording -- I started to think about all the things that can go wrong in an experiment. I started to wonder about how experiments ever work out.

In this experiment, I'm looking at how music affects the brain while people are doing a working memory task. Sounds simple enough, but what kind of music should I choose? What kind of task should I use? What kind of images and/or words should people be trying to remember? How many trials? How many electrodes on their head?

Then, when I get data from enough people, how to analyze it? Do I filter certain frequency ranges? Do I average stimuli that are similar (but not exactly the same)? Do I take into account whether people are musicians or not? If so, how should I define a "musician?"

It seems that many more experiments actually have useful results than would be expected to, based on the number of things that could go wrong or decisions that could have been made incorrectly. For instance, there's Gregor Mendel's original experiment. Mendel was a monk who observed pea plants change as he bred them, and from his observations he famously recorded the basic rules of genetic inheritance. But it turns out the outcome of his very influential breeding experiments was a fluke. If Mendel had chosen traits other than the ones he did, he wouldn't have obtained his very simple and intuitive result.

Maybe we only hear about the experiments that work, and we don't hear about the many experiments that go wrong, so we have an inaccurate view of the proportion of experiments that work. This likely explains some of the imbalance. But I know about all of my own experiments, including the ones that I don't publish because they go wrong. At least in my experience and the experience of other scientists I talk to, the ratio of useful-to-useless results is nowhere near what one would expect based on the hundreds (thousands?) of decisions that need to be made to perform a single experiment.

Instead, I think this lopsidedness in experimental outcome is a case of intuition at work. Scientists are experts at rationalizing everything, that's sort of the job description. In a way, that makes us least likely to notice when an idea arises from our intuition. In fact, it may be that in the well-trained scientists' brain, intuition has a field day because we just come up with a rational explanation for why we'd make one experimental choice over another, and because we're capable of rationalizing anything, voila! Our intuitions can masquerade as well-thought out choices.

On the other hand, this lopsidedness is probably not particular to science at all. In all fields, those who keep doing the work seem to develop expert intuitions about what will make things work and what will mess them up. These intuitions are often not algorithmic -- they live in the seemingly nonlinear space of the subconscious mind.

Regardless of how common this kind of lopsided success rate is, what I think is most important here is that intuition doesn't have to name something mysterious and unexplainable. It can just be a name for the work the subconscious mind does every day -- gathering data, making connections, and coming to conclusions -- without the bulky and bossy conscious mind to get in the way. In that sense, intuition is just a way of letting the sometimes smarter and often wiser subconscious have its say without setting off the alarms of the conscious mind. Scientists or not, it seems to me that listening to our intuition may be like having our own internal oracle.

"Beautifuller" Things

My mom sent me a TED talk about gratitude, and in it a young girl says that she prefers to explore and make discoveries rather than watch TV. She says that the thing about exploring is that it can lead to "beautifuller things" than what you thought was there (worth seeing the 10-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ).

That's exactly the thing about exploring -- about science -- that I love. Feeling clever and insightful for having figured out a little corner of how the universe works, that's exciting and gratifying. BUT, getting invested in the outcome of an experiment because I *think* I've figured out a little corner of the universe...THEN seeing that the results of the experiment have something more "beautifuller" to show me...that's THE BEST.

That is why doing science is addictive. It's not the knowing stuff. It's the not-knowing stuff. It's the dance with the Universe that we enter into, one partner completely foolish and bashful but also full of ideas and confidence...the other partner strong, solid, silent, and slowly (SLOWLY) revealing herself when and if she wants to, and not at all in the way we had anticipated.

I sometimes imagine traveling back in time to have conversations with alchemists, the founders of modern-day chemistry. I imagine they are frustrated and upset by trying to turn non-precious metals into gold and silver. I appear on the scene and they say, "You're from the future...tell us...can one metal be made to turn into another?"

I say, "Yes! But it doesn't work the way you think...." I go into an attempted explanation of nuclear fission and even as I see their disappointment, I also see their eyes light up.

"It can be done!" one of them says. "At least there's that." We share the secret smile of knowing that Nature will open up, eventually, to anyone who is willing not to know and to see with open eyes.

Exciting new developments in science: People are human

All week since I wrote my first blog post, I've felt afraid. I wasn't even sure what I was afraid about, but I felt a quiet and pervasive fear. I wrote a second post a few days ago, posted it for about a day, then took it down. The post was about realizing that I was afraid to come out of the closet as a scientist who is open to spirituality.

In a way, I'm glad I deleted that blog post, because I realized a deeper truth and now I get to write about that. It's not coming out of the closet as a scientist who is open to spirituality that scares me, what scares me is coming out of the closet as a scientist who is human.

Strangely, it seems there's this belief that it's dangerous for scientists to admit their humanity -- when in fact, the only safety is if we do. When I give a talk, if it is culturally safe for me to say that I wished the data turned out differently, or I'm grateful the data turned out the way they did, or that I intuitively thought of an experimental design rather than parametrically examining all possible options -- then not only can I be more objective, but my audience can know the actual truth behind the science I describe. However, if there's no room for that kind of humanity, if there's no room for describing at least our known biases, the science will be warped. Ironically, it will be reported unobjectively.

The place where this paradox blows my mind the most is in my home field, psychology. It seems like every week a paper comes out in which the researchers objectively try to describe data showing that people can't be objective. A great example is the Implicit Associations Test -- take it if you think you have a handle on your own biases: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ .

As an example of this attempt at objectivity, in some journals the first person voice of the scientist is still taboo. It's only in my short scientific career (the last 2 decades) that most scientific journals have started becoming comfortable with authors using the active voice ("We used electroencephalograhic recordings..." versus "Electroencephalographic recordings were used...") It's that the presence of the scientists themselves in the description of the experiment used to seem to be a bit, well, unobjective -- despite the objective truth that scientists were clearly the ones doing the experiment, not some invisible hand.

I feel like I want to help create a scientific culture in which the first-person voice of the scientist is welcomed and appreciated. Though this may feel scary, the other choice is just to feel scared and miserable. At least if I open my mouth and pursue this other path, I can feel scared and happy.

Besides, I was talking to my boyfriend tonight and he reminded me that the world doesn't need another scientist who is afraid of what the rest of the world thinks of his or her inner life. The world doesn't need another person who is trying to make other people think s/he is perfect, pure, or objective. It's a failing task, anyway.

A piece of my work here must be to raise a voice representing at least one scientist who is also a human. Another piece is to ask you this: if you knew you'd fail at making other people think you're some way that you're not, what would you do with that freedom?

When "God" is NSFW*

It has taken me ten long years since the publication of the first edition of my book to write a new edition. It's not that I re-wrote that much of the book, or that I spent those ten years doing research to enrich the text.

It's just that I started taking my academic science career more seriously, and I was afraid that if my colleagues and potential employers saw that I wrote a book with "soul" in the title, "spirituality" in the endorsements, and "God" in the text, I'd be dismissed from the ranks of serious scientists. This is not at all a paranoid fear; there are real biases against spirituality in the academic workplace. This is why I used "NSFW" in the title. *NSFW is an web acronym meaning "Not Safe for Work" -- warning the casual internet user not to click on a link if they're at work because it leads to a page containing sexual or otherwise inappropriate content.

On the other hand, the academic bias against spirituality and religion is not based on paranoid fear either...the lives of many academics have been ruined (or ended) due to religious dogma (for more on the history of science and religion, see philosopher Ken Wilbur's excellent book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul). Further, as an empiricist myself, I value evidence above all. For me, evidence of God is what brought me to faith. But I don't blame anyone else for not having that experience.

What I have done, however, is to write about how the methods of science, not necessarily the products or knowledge gained by science, can be used to inform us about our own inner lives (or "souls" as many of us call them), our connections with the non-physical (or "spirituality"), and our relationships with universe that transcends us ("God").

When you let fear co-mingle with courage, courage always wins. As a result, I'm proud to announce the release of the second edition of my book, Unfolding: The Science of Your Soul's Work. If you buy it before April 15, you can use the coupon code RH44K to save a buck (click on the link to the right; total price is then $3.99).

In this blog, I look forward to writing not only about how our unfolding can benefit from the tools of science, but how the world of science unfolds in relationship to the world of the soul.