breaking away

I'm not sure anyone really appreciates how tough a real research paper is. Dissecting, critiquing, and appreciating someone's work is a lot more challenging than some assert. Some of my colleagues are under the impression that a "research project" is a terse examination of things that are largely on Wikipedia.

For the past 6 free hours I've had I have been examining primary literature and trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective. Gruff! That's the only sound I've been able to make during this little ideal. The article is called "Role of Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Visual Perception" and it is very thick. Those people at Harvard sure know how to spin shit.

One of the greatest blows to the field of science is the inability of the community to communicate. They release these large papers and spend their entire lives on a subset of neurons in the brain but then their work goes unappreciated because they can't articulate what they did in a way that society will grasp.

I am going to tell this straight up: I don't like having to read this article for 6 hours to understand it. I really wish there was an accessory comments section or at least something to break up the thick discourse and abstract study which was performed.

The weirdest thing about it is that I'm a part of it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Preston%20Houston

Next year I will fly from the jib jab of science into a wonderful world of dialog with a greater purpose. Then, I will return to science...possibly. Today I need to get the rest of my application information done done done. This is not something that I should have let go this long.

Yesterday was the superbowl and I called my family. I miss them dearly. If worst comes to worst I will be living at home all next year trying to work a job and save up money for medical school.

This cognitive neuroscience class has proved to be the disillusionment that I needed. Not only did I leave Dr. Lee's lab because the quibbling, high-stress, peculiar, and backward way of life there....but the paradigm of modern neuroscience is frustrating as hell. We were doing exploratory research on a process that I didn't understand. Daily I was criticized for not doing what I was supposed to but I had no idea of what I was supposed to do.

This class taught me, not the underlying mechanisms of my consciousness, but how much I hate research. Biochem/microbiology was straightforward. This class reaffirms that I have no place in science but the clinical. None of this matters but what allows us to better connect with people and advance our understanding of the physical world.

I feel no hatred for the neuroscience community. I definitely feel no love either. Instead, I find myself breaking away with an arm's length respect with regard to their incessant need for unnecessary complexities and arrogant creation of ineffectual work.