Deriving Meaning from Chaos: Making Sense of the World through Science and Research

The human mind is one of the most breathtakingly complex and still poorly understood things in nature. And yet, the mind is the tool with which we attempt to understand our world, ourselves, and it. The mind is in fact the most essential tool in any scientist or researcher’s employ. I have used mine to pour over countless scientific questions throughout my career: from molecules to populations, and from NMR spectroscopy to single cell expression patterns. All the tools that we use to conduct experiments, collect data, and analyze our results would be useless and merely collecting dust if we did not have our minds’ curiosity, logic, ingenuity, and acuity to formulate the experiments, troubleshoot problems, and craft the stories that weave together discrete findings into compelling stories to explain life, the universe and everything. 

So what happens when you have all the tools, a lab to conduct your research, scientific support, and excellent advisement, but your most important tool, your mind, betrays you? Science cannot be pursued without a sound mind, yet confoundingly, scientific researchers have a long history of neglecting and abusing their greatest tool. This has led to a global epidemic of poor mental health among academics with upwards of 6-8 times the rate of depression and anxiety among postgraduates than the general population. The mind is dependent on the brain, and like any other organ we possess, it can and does wear out, malfunction, and even break. Like most diseases, mental illnesses are due to a confluence of biological and environmental factors. Yet our community often fails to recognize this and instead stigmatizes these natural and expected aspects of brain biology resulting in fear, avoidance, and failure to address these issues in practical ways. My research and my academic life have led me on a tortuous path to try to make sense out of our most important tool and encourage all researchers to value it: our minds.