This is a draft post from a few months ago that I forgot about, so the links a slightly dated, but the topics are still relevant.

As I’ve been going through graduate school, I’ve been struggling with how I represent and justify the work that I do. Part of this is trying to explain to my family why I would sign up for what they perceive as simply “more school” (which I think I’ve gotten down). Part of this is ensuring that I am finding fulfillment in the projects I pursue for the next few years… making sure that I enjoy what I am doing daily and find inspiration in the larger context of the work. And part of this is justifying the work for grants and colleagues in terms of the science (will this work shed new light on a problem?) and society (how will this benefit other people?). I spent a lot of time during college trying to make sure that I was putting my skills to use for the benefit of others. And my initial inspiration for a career in neuroscience was music therapy, a field which needs a better understanding of music’s effects on the brain.

But it is tough to draw a line connecting the daily work in the lab to the benefit to society. Any “basic” scientist working on understanding some obscure sliver of how the world works has no idea if or when her work will benefit society. When I explain my research to family, after clarifying that I will not be qualified to perform brain surgeries on humans, I typically say, “In 20 years, the work I’m doing might be useful to doctors working with patients.” That’s OK for family, but it is not such a good sell for the public whose tax money is supporting me and my research and the entire institution that allows it all to happen. The ROI isn’t clear.

But that doesn’t keep scientists from making outrageous claims about how their work will benefit society. It isn’t a new theme, though it has been a recent topic of discussion in Nature, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Many scientists I’ve tried to talk to about this get edgy and defensive and worry about such criticisms being fuel for “anti-science”. But ultimately, scientists make absurd promises in order to keep the grants coming (see “Science built on empty promises“). And they can get away with it because there is no way to measure whether or not those promises have been fulfilled. When, 20 years later, the breakthrough doesn’t happen, scientists simply say, “Oops, guess that didn’t work. It’s science, not engineering… you know how it goes. Give us more money and we’ll cure cancer. Someday. Maybe.”

I think that the problem here is largely one of misrepresentation. The uncertainty in the ROI (which every scientist I’ve talked to acknowledges) is not made clear to the public. Many scientists don’t think that there needs to be an ROI… they believe that the public should support them to simply discover new things regardless of the potential for impact. And that is all well and good if you are receiving funding from a source which expects you to simply discover new things about the world. But those sources are few and far between. Most public funding sources for science want solutions eventually… for curing diseases (NIH), for preventing economic catastrophe due to climate change (DOE & NASA), for maintaining US military dominance (DARPA).

It just doesn’t seem to me that the uncertainty  of the implications of a researcher’s work justifies inventing potential impacts, then insisting that one can’t be held accountable to those impacts.

It never fails.

I show up to a presentation by an auditory neuroscientist that wants to show an example of their stimulus. Maybe its some crazy synthetic stimuli or an ultrasonic frog call or maybe they just want to play some music. And the audio doesn’t work. Someone runs to get a pair of cheap speakers off of their desk and fiddles with the poser and audio cables for 3 minutes. Then the speakers buzz or crackle.

A labmate and I were lamenting this the other day when I remembered the little expandable omnidirectional speaker my friend plugs into his iPod. Would something like that work for a smallish presentation, like a journal club, lab meeting, or brown bag? Maybe for researchers in the auditory sciences, a nice portable speaker should be as critical a part of a one’s presentation arsenal as the laptop, VGA converter, and laser pointer.

That said, I think I’m going to get one of these:

A good friend sent me a link to this article about the recent paper out of the Zatorre lab, “Anatomically distint dopamine release during anticipation and experience of of peak emotion to music.”

The article is titled “Ten Songs that Will Get You High, According to Science,” and it goes on to list these ten songs.

Um. No. If you are going to report on a study, you better read it first.

The author apparently read some other headlines on the article, found the list of songs that were used, and then offered up “ten songs the study used that are as good as your chemical of choice.” As would be expected, many of the songs the commenters disagreed with.

However, there is nothing special about the songs on this list and the study DOES NOT say that there is.

This is an awesome study… but the only things that make these songs special is that they were submitted by the subjects of the study themselves.

From the paper…
“First, individuals provided ten pieces of instrumental music to which they experience intense pleasure and “chills” without restrictions to the genre of music, which included classical, folk, jazz, electronica, rock, punk, techno and tango (see http://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/supplements/supplements_intro.html for samples).”

But then, “control stimuli were selected for each individual using a paradigm where one individual’s pleasurable music is used as another person’s neutral music.”

So its not that these songs are special in and of themselves…. for one subject they might have used Zeppelin as “pleasurable” and Beethoven as indifferent and for another subject visa versa.

The thing is, we already know that music that we like (remember, the subjects chose the music themselves) is pleasurable and there is no need to do a study to test it. What is unique is right there in the title of the study: “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music”.

If you really want to know the ten songs that will “get you high,” then just go find your ten favorite songs… the ones that “give you chills.” Those are the ones you want.

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Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Larcher K, Dagher A, Zatorre RJ. Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience. 2011;(January). Available at: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nn.2726.

Until Sunday…

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So, I’m a just a few months away from orientation, Boot Camp, and the beginning of my first semester of classes in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UC San Diego. One of the big decisions that I’ve had to start thinking seriously about is the first-year research rotations. UCSD’s Neuro program requires three laboratory rotations, intended to offer “hands-on” laboratory experience and find a laboratory for dissertation research. Though we’re only allowed to sign up for the first one prior to Boot Camp, choosing that first one has required thinking strategically about all three.

How does one approach a “strategy” for rotations? Well, this is what I’ve been told:

Telescope or magnifying glass? The vertical approach.

Neuroscience is an incredibly diverse field of research, necessitating inquiry at many levels. Research on genes and neurotransmitters happens very differently than research on the visual system which happens very differently than research on the emotional effects of music. Different areas require different backgrounds, knowledge, and use different tools. Since I’ll be developing expertise at a certain level of the field during my dissertation research, the rotations will be an ideal opportunity for me to explore the other levels of neuroscience, allowing me to put the diverse coursework of the program into a laboratory context and understand the methods that are used throughout the field. Further, UCSD requires second year students to develop a project proposal in an field of neuroscience which is unrelated to their dissertation research, so any proficiency which I can build during that first year would be highly useful during my second year.

Filling up the toolbox. The horizontal approach.

The tough part of this vertical approach is that many of the lab techniques and methods that I learn will not be easily transferable to my dissertation research. Patch clamp recording is a different beast from fMRI… they address different questions at completely different levels of the brain and knowing the former would be of limited immediate value for a dissertation focusing on the latter. Further, like many incoming students, I am comfortable and most interested in a particular level of neuroscience and I think I know what kind of research I want to be doing for their dissertation. So why bother learning “useless” methods during the first year when I could be focusing on building a set of techniques which could be incorporated into my later dissertation research? Instead, I could spend my rotations learning laboratory techniques which could be used on the kinds of questions I want to study.

The sample platter

Ultimately, I expect to employ a combination of the “vertical” and the “horizontal.” Regardless, the key thing that I’ve been encouraged repeatedly to remember, whether talking to advisors, professors, or grad students, is that rotations are a testing ground for selecting a dissertation lab. Every rotation lab ought to be a lab that I am interested in entering for my dissertation research.