Posted on by mamothena

Tangential thoughts and research detours…

I was thinking about procrastination and how even though I work all the time, I still procrastinate! How? By wandering off on tangential thoughts and research “detours.” You know when you are busy with your “real” focus and then get stuck on an idea that is far from central to your research objectives? Then, at the end of the day you worked but not really… This can leave you feeling like you were just day-dreaming and wasting time by reading that interesting but not-so-relevant set of papers.  But in my experience, there are some benefits to these kinds of research detours…

  1. They are the wayward but worthy branches of your research tree

It is okay to be distracted by tangential thoughts related to your analysis; how else would you come up with fresh new ideas? In fact, these detours can reveal more about your work than you were aware of.  Like the wayward branches of a tree. And you can choose what to keep and what to prune off, but at least they show you the full potential of your research, the different directions it can take.

  1. They can unlock writer’s block

I don’t know how many times I have found the answer to my question, or the proper way to articulate myself from reading “irrelevant” things.  It is usually a serendipitous thing because I wasn’t looking for answers there, I was just curious about something.  But something (an idea, a style of writing) catches my eye, and suddenly I’m inspired; and just like that, I’m unblocked!

  1. There’s a bright side to dead-ends and time lost

Entertaining your tangential thoughts and detours takes time. And as PhD students, we don’t got it. Sometimes a detour may actually be a dead-end and you will mourn the time lost. But I have learned to look at that dead-end as productive day-dreaming.  And then I can’t argue with myself because day-dreaming is actually good for your brain. You can’t lose by gaining more broad knowledge of your field. I wrote about a similar thing on literature review and delving deeper, and with analysis it is the same.

  1. Detours still lead to the destination

Just like when the GPS takes you through the unknown route to your destination, sometimes your brain takes a detour that ends up making sense.  What seems like a distraction may actually end up being the answer to your questions. I was doing research on indices for determinants of health outside of the health system – environmental factors, nutrition etc. And one of the recommendations was the need for intersectoral action to address multidimensional contributors to health and disease. I got stuck on the idea of intersectoral action, and engaged with it for quite some time.  Long story short I am now presenting at two conferences with different aspects of my work on that topic.  My thesis is not on intersectoral action for health.  But the utility of my work in the real world is actually at the meeting of the health sector and non-health sector for more holistic action on health.  And this is the exact idea I was challenged to explore by one of my department heads when I presented my research proposal two years ago. The utility of my work and its contribution to the real world.

  1. If you can’t do it now, put it on your bucket list.

And finally, if you can’t go on a detour or get distracted, how about opening a “Tangental Threads” file as you work? It is especially useful when writing or analysing and all these thoughts are coming at you at once. You open a simultaneous file where you jot them all down – references, ideas, anything relevant but distracting. You can come back to them later on, or not. But jotting them down frees your mind to focus on the task at hand. I wish I found out earlier about this — think how many ideas I have lost! (Many are on post-it notes in some trash can somewhere).

So there you have it folks, when it comes to analyzing and writing, let your brain scatter a bit. But everything in moderation. You are still on a deadline.

Posted on by Loosely Translated

Celebrate the stories in science, no matter how small or great

Imagine you are back in the mid-1700s. You are walking the usual five kilometre route it takes you to get to school but instead of following the other children, you cut through a field. Running, because you got distracted by some playful tadpoles in a nearby creek and now you’re late, you trip over a rock and fall. While getting up and dusting yourself off you notice that the rock you tripped on wasn’t a rock but rather the badly weathered top of a skull. Quickly, forgetting about the scrapes on your hands and elbows, you dig around the skull. You notice that this isn’t any normal buck or cow skull, this skull is much too big. Seven year old you, along with many others, wouldn’t know that this skull belonged to the extinct mammoth, not until the mammoth was formally described in 1799, anyway.

Early guesses at what the mammoth looked like

It is 1928, a regular day. You have just come back from a holiday with the family and you return to your lab to find some old bacterial cultures you prepared before you left lying in the corner. On them, a bacteria you’ve looked at a thousand times, Staphylococcus aureus—the causal organism of staph infections, should be growing. Instead, you notice that some of the agar plates have less of the bacteria. “That’s funny,” you say. On these plates, there is something else growing, a mould.  You isolate this mould and soon identify it as Penicillium notatum. Studying its interactions with Staphylococcus and other bacterial pathogens, you quickly realize that the fungus produces some kind of “mould juice” that inhibits the bacterial pathogen’s growth. This “juice” has some sort of antimicrobial property. A few months later, you rename it to what we know it as today, “penicillin.” Twenty years later, just in time for the Second World War, colleagues of yours develop a better method of extracting penicillin from the fungus, a different fungus, and penicillin becomes a commercially used product—beginning the age of antibiotics.

Alexander Flemming
Alexander Fleming

Now, imagine you’re a scientist in 2018; the naming of the mammoth by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming are long in the past; as are so many other past landmark discoveries, like learning the structure of DNA, electricity and the ancestors of humans. As we have advanced our understanding of nature and the universe, these kinds of world-changing discoveries are stumbled on less and less. Of course discoveries are still being made every day but most of them go unnoticed, as do yours.

Generally, scientists seek to make some sort of difference in the world, whether it’s by providing some understanding through knowledge, developing something or discovering something else. It is easy to lose sight of that when you compare your discoveries to your role models and other well-known scientists who came before.

Why do scientists become well-known; why are people well-known?

Because there is a story about them doing something great or something incredibly wrong.

All science should be widely celebrated; scientists are making the unknown known, the difficult easy, the impossible possible—not matter how “small” the finding, it moves humanity forward. It does not matter if you think the stories about your discoveries or the discovery itself are ordinary, tell it; but tell it well and tell it to everyone. Science and unity is all that can save this world and, for the moment, science appears to be our best shot. Let’s unite in the celebration of science and continue our stories forward, proudly, and, should the opportunity present itself as a skull in the ground or contaminated plate, be prepared to trip or stumble onto greatness.

Pint of science, tell your story where you can.jpg

Pint of science, tell your story where you can
Pint of science, tell your story where you can.