It is quite possible that I picked the worst week to begin this blog, but once the idea found its way into my brain, I couldn't let it go.
The base motivation -
A lot of people like TED talks. Science Friday plays through thousands of speakers every week. Facebook is a posting wall for an unending stream of pop-science articles and pseudopsychology articles. As an aspiring scientist, I couldn't be more conflicted in my response to this. On the one hand, I am grateful for the public's interest in current research and findings. I'm glad other people find these topics and correlations fascinating, because I cannot seem to ever stop thinking about them. The problem arises, however, when people take these articles at face value and believe that a p value of .05 equates to concrete fact. This is simply not the case, and there are millions of studies that go unnoticed by the general public because only the flashy ones ever seem to garner a widespread audience.
The current goal -
In an effort both to exercise my critical thinking and analysis of current studies and to provide a relatively unbiased simplified explanation of recent research, I will be choosing articles from Nature and Science every week to read, interpret, and attempt to explain. To start, I will only choose topics within the field of neuroscience, as I am most interested in this field and most familiar with the techniques employed.
The future goal -
I have to main visions.
The first is that I could collect a group of students willing to join me in this venture. If we each covered a few papers each month, we could build up a pretty useful database for others to peruse. This team of students could (and should) involve individuals in a variety of disciplines from a collection of different universities. If this takes off, then I would happily start a new site that is not so inherently neuroscience focused. Before launching into such an ambitious goal though, I want to be sure I can remain committed personally. If I maintain this for a few months, then I will push for phase two.
The second goal I have is to create a personal database of papers to reference in my graduate studies and beyond. I want to read and summarize all the relevant literature to the studies I have conducted myself, and I want to start creating a literature database surrounding topics about which I hope to better understand (including neural engineering, endocrinology, and the synaptic mechanisms of learning and memory).
For now, however, I have medical school applications to complete, a manuscript to write, a Fulbright grant proposal to polish, and an article to write for a hospital newsletter. Who would have guessed that I would have more homework after I graduated than I did as a student...
Until next time.
