隴山隴西郡
寧靜純我心 感得事物人 寫樸實清新. 閑書閑話養閑心,閑筆閑寫記閑人;人生無虞懂珍惜，以沫相濡字字真。
Focus in danger of losing the bigger picture?
|| 推薦到群組
Focus in danger of losing the bigger picture?
Looking back,I found that those did so well by focusing on a small area with competitiveedge, never read anything beyond their focus point – left research along the way –
finding a better career path than “labor intensive” “under-pay” science jobs. Those read widely and voraciously, insatiably hungry for new
knowledge about anything with huge curiosity mindset still re-searching on. I
can’t focus intensively on one little thing for a long time - Focus in danger of losing the
bigger picture, rather
I’d search and jump around to find something I felt inspired and motivated to be creative, freshly revived. If you don't feel excited, how can you work daily on something is hard?
When I's at high school, I did fine art - drawing, more likely doodling now, helping me relax. Writing a post like this takes away my writer-block from some serious thinking - stuck sometimes - getting
away from blocks can regain your power to forge on.
Lab life: Daydream and discover
Tedious daily work might feel frustrating, but idle thoughts can drum up just the right spark of
scientific inspiration. (Nature 537: 255–257, (08 September 2016) (attached below)
How about you?
I found the following article resonates with my view. Excerpted:
"Clay modelling also gives her a chance to turn off the structured, analytical part of her brain,
she says, and allow intuition and creativity to take over. Often, she leaves the studio with a fresh outlook on a knotty experiment. “I'll get out of there and realize, 'Oh, I had not thought of it in this
way before,'” she says.
About science, I'd give you the signing quote on the door in the house of Dr. Zhong Rong-guang, former president of Sun Yat-sen University (Lingnan University).
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13New International Version (NIV))
After all, you gotta love science than anything else to stay put, a long haul (a prolonged and difficult effort or task) - getting yourself stayed in zone of interest is a must.
~?~ --> ~!~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
熱度 24 奴性考第一，天才有傲骨 - 其實真正的天才，成績都不好，起碼不是最好那一類！ 作為父母，你可以管理天才兒童 （兒子或女兒）？As parents, can you handle genius children? Ref 1 - 沒有點奴性是考不到第一的，可是天才隻有傲骨。 (Ref. 2 - 人皆養子望聰明，
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ref.:
Art–science collaborations: Change of perspective
Journal name: Nature Volume:537,Pages:125–126 Date published:(01 September 2016)DOI:doi:10.1038/nj7618-125a Published online 31 August 2016
Pick up a lump of clay or stare at a Leonardo water drawing — your science, not just your frame of mind, will benefit from it.
Semiconductor
Joe Gerhardt, one-half of the UK artist duo Semiconductor, explores the archives at CERN with archivist Anita Hollier as part of the COLLIDE initiative.
After earning her PhD in Earth and planetary sciences, Johanna Kieniewicz found herself in a
coveted tenure-track job. But as she dug more deeply into her work, she felt her field of vision narrowing — and not in a good way. Extreme focus left her worried that she was stifling her creative side.
“With the intensity of those sorts of jobs, it becomes all that you do,” she says. “I was in danger of losing the bigger picture.” To re-engage with her artistic side — she had always had a penchant for drawing and making things with her hands — she took a leave of absence and went to art school. There, she came to realize how
skills taught in the art world could influence science. Asking difficult questions about purpose and ethics, or imagining both fantastic and terrifying futures, helps scientists to put their work in perspective, she says. She used her art experience to nab a dream job as head of outreach and engagement at
the Institute of Physics in London, where she coordinates with art museums and theatres to pull the public into conversations about science. “Ultimately, both artists and scientists are asking big
questions about the world,” Kieniewicz says. “A lot of rich and exciting stuff is happening between them.”
Although Kieniewicz took her affinity for art to the far end of the spectrum, attending art school is
hardly a prerequisite for those who hope to expand their scientific horizons and frame an
experiment differently or get past a sticking point. Even a rudimentary interest in art can help to
shift a researcher's perspective. Routes into the realm include creating your own art, collaborating with artists and viewing art that resonates with you.
“The artist will come in from a bit of a tangent, probing areas where scientists wouldn't
think to probe.”
Making art can be very helpful for scientists when they are failing to make progress. “Sometimes
you have to dive in deeply, but sometimes you're stuck and have to get unstuck,” says Robbert
Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He advises his
students to engage in some form of art when they encounter seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their
research.
Cancer researcher Silvia Balbo relates to that recommendation. She has access to an art studio for
precisely that purpose. It's been her escape ever since she took a sculpting class in high school in
Turin, Italy. “Whenever I feel like things are stuck, I go back to it,” she says. She made use of the
studio many times during a particularly gruelling three-year project on how tobacco smoke and alcohol damage DNA and contribute to cancer.
Balbo would often head, exhausted, directly from her lab at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to the studio. “I'd be super tired, but I'd get there and then suddenly feel super energized,”
she says. “On those days where you feel like you haven't accomplished anything, it's nice to get a
feel for making something. I picked clay because it's constructive: all of a sudden, I have a piece. That immediate outcome is very rewarding.”
Clay modelling also gives her a chance to turn off the structured, analytical part of her brain, she says, and allow intuition and creativity to take over. Often, she leaves the studio with a fresh outlook on a knotty experiment. “I'll get out of there and realize, 'Oh, I had not thought of it in this way
before,'” she says.
Over the course of that project, Balbo sculpted, fired and glazed four pieces: nude women in various languid postures drenched in streaks of blue glaze that she now displays in her home. Ultimately, her team had a breakthrough, and published the findings. In addition to unlocking new ideas in the lab, she credits the sculpting with helping her to stay on track. “It's very energizing to have a peek
into the art world and recharge your batteries,” she says.
Eye of the beholderThe pay-offs of art involvement need not come just from creation. Simply looking at it can also bring benefits: gazing at other people's creative endeavours can help scientists to find inspiration and come up with new approaches. Chemist Catherine Murphy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is drawn to close-ups of natural objects, the bright colours of inorganic compounds and the brilliant hues of gold nanomaterials. She has a copy of artist Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Poppy No. VI on her office wall just so
that she can stare at the flower's vibrant scarlet petals. She once bought a painting at an art fair that looked to her like proteins seen through an atomic force microscope (not what the artist had in
mind, she says). “I thought it was really interesting that the same visual could be perceived in so many different ways,” she says. “In science, the more different perspectives you have on the phenomena you're studying, the richer the understanding becomes.”
Other ways to stretch scientific thinking are discovered when researchers collaborate with artists. So effective have these partnerships been for stimulating scientific creativity that some research
institutions have established programmes to encourage them (see 'Up your art quotient'). Europe's particle-physics laboratory, CERN, for example, established a programme called COLLIDE to foster ingenuity through the exchange of ideas between scientists and artists. The initiative brings world-class artists to the laboratory and campus in Geneva, Switzerland, for a residency of up to three
months.
CERN theoretical physicist Luis Álvarez-Gaumé (who moves to Stony Brook University in New York this month), recently worked with two
UK artists as part of the initiative. The artists used scientific data and computer-generated animation to probe how scientific instruments and discoveries in particle physics influence the perception of nature. Explaining his work to them for their upcoming piece helped Álvarez-Gaumé to find holes in his own knowledge. “It allows us to really see, to appreciate and
understand what we are talking about,” he says. Kieniewicz agrees that working with artists helps scientists to reframe their thinking. “The artist will come in from a bit of a tangent, probing areas where scientists wouldn't think to probe,” she says. “They are really good at asking 'what if' questions —
'what if we could hear the Higgs boson?'”
Art–science collaborations can produce other benefits, too. Murphy established a programme at her
lab in which university art students come in and ask questions of her chemistry pupils. She quickly
realized that her students rapidly improved at communicating their work and ideas. “When you're
giving a presentation to a totally non-scientific audience, you have to be able to communicate really well,” she says.
And scientists are often awestruck by seeing artists portray what they've learned in completely new ways. Artists who have worked alongside Murphy's students, for example, have created everything
from a dance interpreting the view through an electron microscope to a computer-sized block of canvas with light bulbs shining through at various levels of brightness, inspired by
the gold particles that the artist glimpsed through a microscope. Because the results are usually
exhibited to both scientists and artists, they provide an ideal opportunity for interdisciplinary conversations.
The collaborations spawn more than impressive art — they are rich for researchers too, says Martin Kemp, an emeritus art historian at Trinity College in Oxford, UK, who specializes in visualization of science and has written a book called Structural Intuitions: Seeing Shapes in Art and Science (Univ.
Virginia Press, 2016). He says that perception is deeply embedded in the brain by the end of formal schooling, yet researchers must embrace other ways of thinking and visualizing, and can do so
through making or viewing art. He thought he was leaving science forever when he went to do graduate studies at an art institute — until he stumbled across Leonardo da Vinci's water drawings. The detailed sketches depicting patterns and shapes of water, wind and air reflect the theory of hydrodynamics, he says — completely applicable to both art and science. “I felt I'd come home,” Kemp says.
Although that sort of leap is practical for very few (“It doesn't help to have art school on your CV
to get funded,” Balbo says), most of the bright scientists Kemp knows engage in the arts in some
form. And some even say it is essential to their careers.
“If I had not gone to art school, I don't believe I would be a scientist today,” Dijkgraaf says.
Lab life: Daydream and discover
Journal name:NatureVolume:537,Pages:255–257Date published:(08 September 2016)DOI:doi:10.1038/nj7619-255aPublished online07 September 2016
Tedious daily work might feel frustrating, but idle thoughts can drum up just the right spark of scientific inspiration.
When biologist Adrian Smith chose to study ants, he approached the field with ambitious questions and big dreams of discovering how animal societies work. The reality was much less glamorous.
Meg Kumin/Marcom/The University of Kansas
Palaeontologist David Burnham has landed on some of his best ideas while mindlessly digging for bones.
To capture ant colonies to study in the lab, he digs human-sized holes and then plucks out thousands of insects, one by one. After six hours or more of this backbreaking work, Smith, who works at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, and his teammates sometimes discover that the queen is missing, or they've inadvertently cut her in half. They then have to start over again.
Such mind-numbing work occupies researchers' time in most specialities. By nature, science depends on intensive data collection, repetition and replication. To cope with the tedium, experienced scientists have found tricks for making the work more pleasurable, such as getting to know colleagues who are in the same trenches and keeping long-term goals in mind.
Given the intense focus required for the bulk of their work, many scientists learn to value brainless tasks that allow them to zone out and indulge in free thinking. That can lead to creative research ideas or ways to boost efficiency. Faced with day after day of doing the same thing, researchers who appreciate boredom can gain insight into their goals and priorities.
Survival gameBoredom is a typical part of the process of scientific discovery, which rarely happens in a day. Even when intriguing results emerge, it can take many months to write a paper, get it peer reviewed and complete multiple revisions, and then wait for publication before sharing discoveries with the world. The first step towards coping successfully can be simply to accept the drill.
“We wouldn't be on the edge of discovery if it was easy,” Smith says. “Sometimes, you're in places where no one has really looked, or you're seeing something no one has seen before. To get to that point, it takes some tedious work.”
At such times, it can help to remember that the work might eventually bring bursts of exhilaration or, sometimes, a real thrill of discovery, says David Burnham, a palaeontologist at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum in Lawrence. He regularly digs for dinosaur bones — an experience that resembles a notorious description of war, he says — it entails “long periods of boredom, interspersed with high excitement”.
Every trip begins months beforehand with much tiresome preparation, such as filling out forms to get excavation permits. Once his team arrives in the field, the group has to organize gear, drive on bumpy dirt roads and hike to a site where the researchers set up tents and equipment. Then comes the slow process of digging, often in hot or otherwise uncomfortable conditions. The work starts with shovels and picks, but when fossil evidence begins to appear, the palaeontologists switch to smaller, more delicate tools to unearth what might end up being just unidentifiable shards of bone. Any finds that could add to the overall puzzle must be carefully wrapped and meticulously documented before being taken to the lab, where an even more delicate process of excavation and investigation continues.
Sean Mattson/Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Biologist Karen Warkentin counts frog eggs.
As the hours disappear, Burnham keeps in mind the possibility that he might at any moment find a motherlode of bones or a fossil that will change everything. Equally motivating are sporadic discoveries that shed light on big questions. Sometimes, the pay-off can be huge. On one memorable dig in China, Burnham's team found a raptor that turned out to be a new species. During the monotonous fact-checking process required to verify the find, the team compared the new bones to those of a related raptor and realized that the relative had grooved teeth, which suggested that it was venomous. That realization led to a paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1 in 2010, that described the first venomous raptor ever known.
Finds such as those are rewarding enough, he says, to confer a surprisingly high tolerance for boredom or similar discomfort. “That one piece of excitement is so exhilarating,” he says. “It just gets into your blood and you have to keep going.”
Telling others about your grand goals can be another way to endure tedium, suggests David Hadley, an epidemiologist in Tampa, Florida, who does both academic and industrial research. He is developing a programme that would help oncologists to settle on the best course of care for patients with cancer on the basis of treatment data from previous patients and other information such as their ages, gender and genetic variations. To get it right, he has to run a lot of computer simulations and then wait as a computer crunches data, sometimes for up to a week. Often, results reveal mistakes that need to be fixed before the next simulation can be run. “It really helps to talk to other people about the big picture, not necessarily about what you are doing day to day, but about what you are trying to achieve overall,” he says. “In my case, it's trying to help sick kids. That is why I'm motivated to do it.”
Grunt work to growthJust as musicians need to learn scales before they can improvise, grunt work is a necessary step towards designing studies to answer big questions, adds William Stoops, a behavioural pharmacologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has spent many hours supervising research subjects as they interact with a computer to earn doses of addictive drugs, with the goal of working out what drives drug use and abuse, and finding treatments. “If you can't understand what a subject is supposed to do in a session, and you design an experiment that's just not feasible, it will fail,” he says. “Every graduate student and postdoc learns this stuff from the ground up.”
Frequently reminding yourself of the potential pay-off can make delayed gratification more palatable, Smith says. “It sucks until it doesn't” is a mantra that he repeated to himself on a trip this year to Florida, where he spent eight long, hot days roaming around forests getting bitten by mosquitoes while crawling on his hands and knees to look for ants. It was tough going until he found what he was looking for: colonies of Formica archboldi, a species that preys on other ants and litters its nests with their carcasses. He wanted to take them to his lab to study their prey preferences and possible predatory behaviours.
It could always be worse, adds neuroscientist Dean Burnett, who, as a graduate student at Cardiff University, UK, watched many rats navigate many mazes, tallying which direction the rats chose at each turn, to try to understand how they retrieved memories. Without a way to automate data collection, he would remind himself of the glamour of his previous job: embalming corpses for a medical school.
He recommends starting work with your eyes open and the expectation that some tasks will be less fun than others. “People want to do science, and they have big lofty goals,” he says. “A lot is day-to-day work. There can't be many jobs that are generally enjoyable all day, every day.”
To make monotonous work more bearable, it can also be useful to schedule repetitive tasks to match your own ebbs and flows of energy, says Karen Warkentin, an integrative biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts. To do her work, she has forced herself to stay awake many nights in a dark lab, waiting for snakes to wake up and eat frog eggs. She has walked around a pond counting bundles of dozens of eggs, often recounting and recounting. And she has measured thousands of frogs as they grew from tadpoles to adults, all in the name of understanding plasticity in the early-life stages of amphibians, among other goals. After handling frogs all day, she spent evenings plugging numbers into spreadsheets and checking columns — clocking 16-hour work days in what she calls a “crazy marathon” of an experiment.
She prefers different times for different tasks. For her, early morning is usually best for creative work, such as writing. When her brain feels fried, often after lunch or in the evening, she finds satisfaction in repetitive jobs. “You can feel like, 'Hey, I'm still being productive',” she says.
Warkentin likes to work in silence, but many researchers distract themselves by listening to music, podcasts or books on tape (see 'Tunes for tedium'). Tedious times can also be a bonding experience, Burnham says. While digging for dinosaur bones, his field crew chats and jokes around, creating memories and forging friendships. “The best way to endure it is to put together a field crew of people who are like-minded and enthusiastic and really want to be there,” he says. “Then you can sit around and have fun.”
Building with boredomBoredom isn't just something to endure: it can carry value of its own, giving the brain uninhibited space to wander and wonder. As a graduate student, Smith had an idea while watching ants (Novomessor cockerelli) move around in a box for hours: what if he reunited a group of isolated worker ants with the queen instead of with the rest of the colony, as he had done in other experiments? The results were surprising: the queen attacked the main worker and rallied the rest of the workers to gang up on it. The discovery spawned two publications: one in the German journal Naturwissenschaften2 in 2011, and the other in Animal Behavior3 in 2012.
Smith also credits boredom for some unexpected twists in his career. During bouts of daydreaming and podcast-listening while doing menial tasks, he decided to create a series of YouTube videos and launch a podcast, Age of Discovery, in which he interviews biologists about their careers. Developing those multimedia skills helped him to land his current job, which includes outreach and communications. “I spent countless hours thinking about whether I wanted to commit to things that were tangential to my research but turned out to not be tangential to my career,” he says. “That stuff wouldn't have happened if I was just occupied in front of the computer writing all the time or whatever.”
Boredom can also spark creative ways to minimize it. Frustrated with how long it took to run computer simulations for his software, Hadley more than once boosted his efficiency by rewriting programs created by others. “If you are only doing something once or twice, you can afford to wait a couple of seconds,” he says. “When you are doing permutations two million times, that's two million seconds lost. It helps me reduce my downtime.”
These kinds of stories are being documented in an emerging field of research on the value of boredom. In one study4, Jennifer Hunter, a PhD student at York University in Toronto, and her colleagues found that — after accounting for traits such as extroversion — people who are prone to boredom also report being curious types, adding to growing evidence that boredom can breed innovation. “I think it can be a huge catalyst,” she says. “Don't ignore your boredom. It can tell you really powerful things about what you're doing.”
As a career evolves, boredom can become a state of comfort. Although Warkentin's frog-counting work might sound tedious, she doesn't mind it — instead, she finds it satisfying to be in the natural world and enjoy serendipitous experiences with wildlife. She looks for the same personality fit when fielding applicants for her team. “When I'm recruiting students,” she says, “I'm like, 'Does this sound like your idea of a good time?'”
The answer might be 'no', and those feelings are worth paying attention to, says Margaret Couvillon, a behavioural ecologist who recently completed a postdoc at the University of Sussex, UK, and will soon begin teaching entomology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. Couvillon started out as a neurobiology PhD student, and found herself staring at slices of bird brains. As she slowly inserted probes into the tissue to find neurons, she became discontented. Her true interest was animal behaviour, and she realized that she really wanted to watch animals in action, not study their brains in the lab.
When she transferred to an ecology programme elsewhere, she discovered that her experiments included plenty of tedious elements, too. She has spent “many, many, many hours” watching videos of dancing bees (Apis mellifera) and timing and measuring their movements to determine where they forage. She has also spent a lot of time sitting in front of honeybee feeders, counting insects that visit and waiting for long stretches when none come by. But Couvillon has discovered that she's much happier enduring boring work when it addresses the questions that truly interest her. And with so much of her time taken up by mentally exhausting tasks, she has come to cherish the chance to sit by a honeybee feeder on a nice day. She suggests keeping expectations realistic — after all, nobody has a job that delivers eureka moments every day.
She also recommends shadowing a variety of scientists to see whether the daily reality seems appealing before committing to a speciality. “Not all dirty work is created the same,” Couvillon says. “You have to have an everyday life you can handle.”
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