For David Mintz, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and an attending
physician, neuroscience is actually a lot like philosophy.
"The goal of philosophy is to understand the world we live in," says Mintz.
"Really, the world we live in is a function of how our brains sense and process
what goes on around us. Our experiences are basically defined by that one
organ, the brain. To the extent that you could ever understand the nature
of humanity, I think it would involve understanding in a very complete sense
the way the brain works."
While Mintz himself doesn't do research directly connected to these topics,
he says it's all a part of a larger goal.
"For instance, one of the questions I’m interested in is: What is the nature
of unconsciousness? If you could figure out what unconsciousness was, you
could understand a lot more [about] what it means to be conscious."
Deanna Benson is a professor of neuroscience at a school of medicine in
New York. She says that she loves her job and can't imagine being anything
other than a neuroscientist. But she warns that it's a lot of work to become
one.
"The training for any science PhD is a long road that requires commitment,
dedication and a passion for science," she says. "You have to be the kind
of person who’s driven by finding an answer to a question and can put up with
hours and hours of rote work in order to do it. That said, there are few things
that can top looking at your data and knowing that you have the answer to
an important question, and that you are probably the only person in the world
that knows the answer."
Benson says that those questions and answers are a huge part of what a
neuroscientist deals with. She says that if you're working in neuroscience
research, defining the question that you are asking is the most important
thing.
"This usually starts with an idea embedded in an observation or finding
that you’ve had, or an insight that you have about work that you’ve read about,"
she says. "The question is often a large one that can be broken into steps
that can be divided amongst various experimental approaches, each of which
will generate data that you can quantify."
Sound like fun yet? Yes? Then maybe the neuroscience life is for you! Benson
says that the next step in research is "the long part."
"For most of us, there are many long days involving some kind of observation
or experiment -- imaging cellular events on a microscope, recording neural
activity, recording behavior -- that is repeated several times over. The data
are then analyzed quantitatively, a process that is becoming increasingly
sophisticated as our ability to acquire large data sets has improved. And
then you see the answer."
Benson's enthusiasm for finding answers is obvious. She says that each
answer to each step brings the researcher closer to answering the larger question
that they're trying to figure out.
"And you never know what you will see," she says. "Often the answers are
not the ones that you expected, so you have to adapt and incorporate the data
into an ever-evolving hypothesis."
Because it takes such a long time to become a neuroscientist, it's important
to enjoy yourself along the way, says Mintz. After all, if you're not enjoying
getting there, chances are good you're not going to enjoy being there.
"I guess, perhaps this is a little bit cliché, but the journey is very
important for these types of careers that take a long time to train for,"
he says. "The way you know that it’s for you is that most of the time you
enjoy the process that it takes to get there and always want to continue."
Mintz says that he knows a number of people who started graduate school
and realized it wasn't for them because they were always thinking about what
it would be like when they graduated, instead of enjoying their time there.
"Don't delay gratification too long," he says. "Find something that you
enjoy preparing for just as much as you think you’ll enjoy doing it."