Author Archives: Michael

What does education affect? Everything.

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Education allows for upwards class mobility, reducing poverty; it drives advances in medicine and agriculture, improving healthcare and quality of life and reducing hunger; it allows leaders to make better, historically informed decisions, promoting peaceful relations between nations and improving the general welfare of citizenry through effective governance; it enriches the arts, philosophy, and humanities, allowing us to probe more effectively our own natures and purposes; and – most importantly – it encourages dreaming and discovery.

On mistakes vs. regrets

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A mistake is a decision made incorrectly and inconsistently given one’s currently available resources and knowledge. It is *not* merely a regret, viewed from the vantage point of one now wiser having seen its outcome, but a decision which, acting rationally in the exact same scenario, with only the knowledge available to you then, would not be repeated.

Green Eggs and Ham

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It’d be interesting if there were a restaurant themed around the works of Dr. Seuss (called “Green Eggs and Ham”?) They could host birthday parties, have foods inspired by the stories, get people to prance around in costumes, post witty made up words on the menus… and oh, the places they’ll go for delivery!

My imagination is wandering today. If anyone’s feeling zany, feel free to run with this 🙂

Leadership Challenges

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They occur in humans fairly similarly as they do in dogs: that is to say, they’re mostly psychological challenges to the dominance of the current leader, exhibited before the entire group. The social dynamics of humans and dogs actually strike me as quite similar in many other respects as well.

Anyone aspiring to group leadership pretty quickly finds that it’s no picnic, though. It’s a *huge* responsibility.

Expectations vs. Reality

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Just thinking back on how I ended up in grad. school, I ran across one of the many paragraphs of text I had previewed when applying that deceived me into thinking it was other than it was.

“Applicants should be highly motivated with strong academic credentials and a desire to pursue creative scholarship”

They don’t really want motivated students… my motivation is giving them no end of trouble right now :). But it does seem that they request one set of traits and practice another. I remain proud that every word in my personal statement was true, but I’ve been herded so far from the plan I had outlined within it that it may as well have been composed of lies (as so many others are) for all of the impact it has had.

A word of advice to the bright-eyed graduate applicants: don’t be deceived as I was. Noble as science is, what you are entering into is nothing other than an apprenticeship. You are perceived and used as a tool within your lab. Your interests do not matter, your talents do not matter, your will does not matter, the quality of your work does not matter. Only your capacity to carry out your superiors’ bidding matters. And they will keep you there for as long as they wish, whether you meet the requirements to graduate or not.

At least they can’t break your bones anymore.

Are somatiform disorders really psychiatric rather than neurological in origin?

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Upon examining several “psychosomatic” conditions, noting their hypothesized causes, observable signs (and lack thereof), and suffering through some of them myself over the years from time to time (as someone prone to somatization disorder but self-aware enough to recognize it for what it is), I’ve come to the conclusion that these disorders are largely neurological rather than psychiatric in origin. That’s not to say that stress or other psychiatric factors can’t provoke these diseases; they very often do. However, the predisposition to these conditions appears to be largely innate, with lower pain thresholds and increased visceral sensitivity prevalent in a number of conditions, as well as objectively observed differences in the levels and balance of neurotransmitters (particularly serotonin). And then there’s the resistance of somatization to psychiatric treatment (probably exaggerated; one study found that CBT worked well), suggesting a neurally-grounded cause.

All this is to say that we should be paying more attention to the neurological basis for these diseases. I haven’t run across any good fMRI studies of patients with somatiform disorders, both at rest and when suffering from the disorder. It’d be an interesting direction to explore.