In every science textbook starting in middle school and continuing through college, the first chapter is always on the scientific method. It is a very dry topic to read about and my eyes always glazed over as I tried to make my way through the chapter. Maybe that is why I never really liked science in middle and high school. Science can be really exciting, but the minutiae of the scientific method--sorting out positive and negative controls, making sure your methods actually address your hypothesis, and trudging through what statistical analysis you should run--can bring all of the excitement quickly to a halt.
Fortunately, college took the science out of my textbooks, brought it to life, and changed the course of my own life. (After my first college science course successfully put me to sleep, I decided I would major in French, but, the next semester the introductory course on neuroscience that I took just for fun enraptured me.) In Intro to Brain and Behavior we traded our textbooks for journal articles, traveled to the border of our knowledge on the brain, looked over the edge, and constructed hypothetical bridges to link two adjacent "knowledge cliffs" in a new way. The scientific method was still important, but instead of learning what it was, we learned how to put it into practice.
Fortunately, college took the science out of my textbooks, brought it to life, and changed the course of my own life. (After my first college science course successfully put me to sleep, I decided I would major in French, but, the next semester the introductory course on neuroscience that I took just for fun enraptured me.) In Intro to Brain and Behavior we traded our textbooks for journal articles, traveled to the border of our knowledge on the brain, looked over the edge, and constructed hypothetical bridges to link two adjacent "knowledge cliffs" in a new way. The scientific method was still important, but instead of learning what it was, we learned how to put it into practice.
Now that I work in a Neuroscience lab at MIT, the scientific method is a part of my daily life. It is no longer boring but essential to what I do and how successful I am at doing it. This week I have been reminded of how important it is to go back to the basics covered in Chapter 1. Thinking up experiments is not a difficult task; there are endless ways to manipulate all sorts of variables and even more ways to record and observe what happens. It is easy to get caught in a data deluge and even easier to get so focused on collecting data that you forget what interested you to begin with.
I like to be productive and I like to show something that proves my productivity. For these reasons, I find it hard to justify spending time on the thinking, reading, and hypothesizing that is supposed to come before the experimenting. (I also hate being wrong, which is why I am wary to make predictions.) But if you don't formulate a specific question that you are interested in, then you will find yourself where I ended up this week: in the middle of nowhere without a map to guide myself somewhere.
So, today I started constructing a map. It was hard at first to figure out where to even start, but I took a step back to notice the nearby landmarks: neuronal activity, activity-regulated transcription, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, transcription factor binding sites, learning and memory. And then I started reading, and thinking, and hypothesizing--building bridges across an entrenched landscape.
