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.