Secrets of Science

Ever since I was little, I’ve always been proud to say my parents were scientists. In elementary school they would come into my class and do experiments, little ones like putting our hands in Petri dishes and watching the bacteria that grew, (I still remember the kid who had the most germs, his reputation in elementary school was forever changed after that). I think I had access to a particularly nerdy childhood having chemists for parents, because my dad kept all sorts of weird chemicals in the basement and access to even stranger things in the lab. On our birthdays there would be dry ice in the punch, and my dad would go around and pour the vapor over each of us. I don’t know how many people can accurately describe the feeling of dry ice vapor poured over their heads but my sister and I have a certain expertise in that area. The feeling is very much like what I think a Dementors kiss is like… Cold… it gives you the shivers like a ghost is caressing your face, but with weight, and the weight disappears before it reaches your shoulders. Strange.

In middle school, my dad came and gave a presentation on the biology of the cell to my class, describing the organelles and their functions. My science teacher, Mr. Cunningham, was a hard man to please and notorious for standing in the hallways during passing period and yelling “Get outta my hallway!” to any juvenile running late. He had a slight southern twang to his voice and I vividly remember the day he described addiction to us and described his family history of alcoholism and his own addiction to caffeine. We were all terrified of him. But he loved my parents and thus he loved me, and paid particular attention to me, expecting just a little bit more. I wish I could go back and see him again now that I’m a grown-up. I wonder if he would still be as tall and scary as I remember.

One day in high school, I remember coming home after chemistry class and telling my dad how we experimented with magnesium and lit it aflame. He asked how much and I said it was just a little bit, and we had to wear dark goggles or maybe it was lit under some cover, I don’t really remember now. But my dad didn’t think I had gotten the experience necessary to really appreciate magnesium’s qualities. So he proceeded to take me in the garden and pour a MASSIVE pile of magnesium on the stones. He then lit that and if you have ever seen magnesium burn it is white hot and bright like stars, absolutely beautiful, and awesome on a massive scale. I know my dad was trying to show me the things about science that first sparked his own interest.... pyrotechnics and the awesomeness that was basic chemistry.

We did other things too, one of my favorite was purifying unprocessed silver in the basement and making awesome silver bars (I felt like a pirate). Unfortunately we couldn’t do a lot of that because the fumes were a bit much and the ventilation in the basement wasn’t very good. You might be wondering, how did we get unprocessed silver? I’ll leave that up to your imagination right now, but I still feel like I have only an inkling of exactly how much treasure my dad has in our basement. (Funnily enough, unprocessed silver looks just like dirt. Really really heavy dirt.)

So… what about my obsession with science? Clearly my parents have always loved it, always done it and always will do it. But I wonder now how it rubbed off on me.

Anyone who knows me, knows that when some social or emotional situation occurs in my life, that takes priority. Whether it be friendships or love affairs, I have a self-narrative that reads like a novel, people are like chapters as they come and go in my life and have a huge effect on me. When I was younger my parents and my sister called it drama, and now that I’m older… well I guess it might still be drama but I’ve just learned how to handle myself better. The nice thing about studying people is that you get really good and communicating with them… most of the time.

But the point is, I think it comes as no surprise that I became interested in psychology because I do believe without a doubt that we are social creatures and the people we meet, or don’t meet, are going to define who we are. We think of ourselves in the context of others around us. And when they aren’t there, then their memory defines us. Many consider psychology a “soft science” because the mind isn’t something we can define, it is simply too complicated. We can’t get much further than theory, there is a clear lack of hard facts. But is that necessarily such a bad thing? I remember reading a wonderful quote in college:

“"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

-- Emerson M. Pugh

I love this quote. I think it is a perfect oxymoron. There is some amazing research going on in the world, let me tell you, but at the same time we are still just scratching the surface. And the beautiful thing about science is that there will always always ALWAYS be something left to discover, and something left a mystery.

I love psychology because it confirms what I have always known and felt about myself – I am complicated. My mind is a wonderful maze and I will never be defined. Humans are irrational, the ultimate biological anomaly simply because we woke up one day and considered the future, the past, and the self.

If I love psychology because of it’s ambiguity, then why am I here in Germany in a lab trying my luck at some hard science? The answer is, because I love the brain. The brain is amazing, and the human brain is simply a miracle. As my father would say, Mother Nature has made it very difficult for us to discover her secrets to life. We are like detectives, following the clues and usually stumbling unexpectedly on an answer we weren’t expecting. But we are learning, bit by bit, what it means to be human. Research is just an obsession for those who want answers. And even if we do discover every gene, and define every region of the brain and even count every neuron, the mystery and miracle of the human condition will still exist.  I don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully understand what it means to be human and I think that is exactly the point. We have to keep searching, keep experiencing and digging for clues because with every new experience we have the opportunity to understand a bit more about the self. What is most important in life (in my opinion) , is to always have the desire to discover. The curiosity. Whether it be discovering the world, the self, or the secrets of science. And I think I’ll try all three.