Lizard vs. Brain in a No-Holds-Barred Cagematch

We've all done it before. We're doing something we've done a million times, like drive home from work, when all of a sudden, our attention fades and we come to. We might be at home, we might be at a favorite bar, we might be at a mate's house - bottom line is, we have no idea how we got there.

This is a phenomenon known as the cognitive failure, or more specifically an attentional lapse, and there are a lot of ways to interpret what that means. It has been used to refer to the failure mentioned above, where your brain recognizes an oft-repeated pattern and (anthropomorphically) goes, "well, I don't need to pay attention anymore." It can also be used to describe the moment during an oft-repeated pattern where your higher cognitive function (i.e., your frontal lobe) tunes back in. A great example of this is when a professional baseball player suddenly fails to field a very standard ground ball. Suddenly, rather than just sitting back and leaving the long-programmed response to its own devices, his frontal lobe is attempting to break down and analyze the process, leading to the kind of fielding errors he'd have made in the early days of Little League. In sports, it's also common to see the moment after an attentional lapse occurs and the athlete panics and tries to catch up. A good example of this is when you see a basketball player instinctively reach for a ball and commit a silly foul. Finally, there is also one of the more severe examples of the attentional lapse seen in the instinctive drowning response. In the last few moments before someone drowns, they stop moving their legs, press their arms down into the water to hold themselves upright, and instinctively gulp air when their noses and mouths are above water and hold their breath when under water. This might sound normal, except when you take into account what this actually looks like: rather than panicking and thrashing about and screaming, the victim silently bobs up and down in the water with a blank facial expression and will not respond to ropes or other rescue devices thrown to them. This situation occurs when the victim's neural system has been so flooded with signals that it can actually no longer respond, which results in autonomic functions taking over.

So what ties all of these things together? All of these situations are marked by a battle or interaction between our higher cognitive function and our primitive lizard brain. It probably looks like this:

<insert picture of a lizard fighting a brain with like, a trident or something here. I'm sure you'll be able to find one on the internets.>

As much as we love to think of our brains as single seamlessly-running units, that is really not the case. Much of our behavior is regulated through the frontal lobe (in general), which is, among other things, in charge of inhibiting the limbic system, which is (also among many other things) our center for the three F's: Fucking Fighting! Fucking Flight-ing! And also fornicating. All jokes aside, the limbic system also regulates essential autonomic functions like breathing and heart rate and generally preventing us from becoming ex-humans. Because these are essential functions for the alive-making, the brain has a general preference for keeping that system functioning even if it doesn't have the energy to expend on the others. That means the frontal lobe, our human-y center of human-y functions like decision-making, planning, expression of emotions, directed motor functions, and information analysis (again, among others) might get the shaft when we're in various states. These states could be dire, such as when we're at risk of drowning, panicked, such as when we're committing silly fouls in basketball, or bored, such as when we end up somewhere we can't remember heading to or make silly fielding errors. In all of these situations, the "prime" function shifts back and forth between the higher cognitive functions of the frontal lobe and the primitive functions of the limbic system.

So why is all that relevant? Well, it sort of underscores a point about the fallibility of our neural function as it relates to attention and everyday activities (and well...non-everyday activities in terms of the drowning) and the idea of self-control. As much as it becomes a defense in murder cases, we are often NOT in total control of our actions, and sometimes we just have to live (or...not live) with that.

Women in Science - The Importance of a Mentor

A while back, the subject of women in science came up, and I suggested that it was easier to sustain the attention of boys than girls in science. I know it is not in any way the PC thing to say, but based on my experience this seems to be the case.

Now when I say this I'm not talking about interest in science, which anyone can have (and if I have anything to say about it EVERYONE should have), I'm talking specifically about what it takes to be a scientist, meaning the focus and energy necessary to obtain PhDs and regularly generate new research and publish on a regular basis and hold professorships. When it comes down to it, you DO see far fewer women than men doing these things. And I think there are several mechanisms at work here. One of the factors I see that has lent itself to this disparity, that I have spent years trying to work on, is the ability to mercilessly tear both others' and your own work to shreds. And the other, the one that makes me the saddest if it's true, the reason that there are fewer women TO be merciless, is the relative importance of finding a mentor that can set an example to guide them.

The Mentor
You could say several things in response to this issue. 1 - there are so few women in science anyways that it would be hard to find a female mentor that they can relate to if that's what they need; 2 - don't men need mentors too?; 3 - you should just shut up your prejudiced ass, there's no problem, and you're wrong. In response to the first, I have actually worked in a lab with a female principle investigator (PI) and I can say that just finding another female is not enough. There were three PhD students in this lab, two men and one woman, and two undergraduate research assistants, one male and one female (me). I worked closely with one of the male PhD students, the female PhD student, and the male RA, and by the end of the 2nd semester, both the female PhD student and I had left because of lack of guidance from the PI. The male PhD student and RA stayed on.

Of course, this is not to say that the mentor has to be female. I had a wonderful working relationship with my graduate advisor. The other master's student (male) and I both found our needs perfectly served by our brilliant and laid-back PI, as we were both highly self-motivated and had lots and lots of ideas. Our advisor helped to groom and streamline our ideas, and we both left the program with our degrees and the motivation to continue in the field. However, our experiences might not have been equivalent to many others. Among the students, we'd had a long string of males that have graduated with PhDs, either from our lab or sent off to get PhDs from different schools after completing undergrad and master's programs there. The women...not so successful. I believe we'd had a string of female master's students that had successfully graduated, but one female PhD student was infamously asked to leave the program after a couple years, and the most recent (female) PhD student did not seem entirely happy with the lab or her advisor.

To answer the second question, in my observations, men don't seem as affected by mentors as women. I've seen plenty of male students who dislike/don't get along with/don't connect with their advisors graduate. Of course, there are some more dramatic examples of male interactions with their advisors (here and here), and rather than discard them as outliers, I think I'd suggest that males might stick around in programs in spite of their mentors up to a certain threshold, after which extreme behavior might occur.

To address the final question/indignant statement, I've found a few sources that suggest that females drop out of PhD programs at a higher rate than men (here and here). And all you need to do is look around to see the systemic issue plaguing the scientific community and country at large and yell my favorite accidental slogan in recent memory: WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? (and believe me, this will be discussed in detail at a later date.)

The Quality of Mercy
In most talks and lectures I went to as a master's student, it was the males that were shooting off questions, poking holes in the ideas of the presenters, and generally being the most vocal. This would likely not surprise many of you. The thing is, I often saw a few women of comparable educational background and research experience in the room nodding their heads in agreement when their male colleagues asked questions or made comments. If they were thinking it too, what stopped them from asking it? SPEAK UP LADY, WE CAN'T HEAR YOU.

I took a class in Cognitive Modeling/Artificial Neural Networks in grad school that completely changed my life. The subject matter was fantastic, and the discussion-based format was wonderful, but the thing that really blew me away was my classmates. At least 50% of my classmates were female, and they were by far the most vocal (with the exception of this dude named Pavel, who was brilliant if a little bit anarchic and loved playing devil's advocate. I thought he was hilarious. The rest of the class didn't). They asked questions, they poked holes, and what's more important, they had no problem either disagreeing with the entire class (including the teacher) or showing that they might not be getting it. About halfway through the semester, you could practically see the shock on the professor's face at the fact that this group of female neuroscience students was basically running his class. And he loved it (we all ended up with A's).

So what's going on here? I haven't yet figured it out completely, but I've noticed something - it all goes back to the mentor. The female students I respected the most in my school had...well, for lack of a better word, assholes as advisors. These principle investigators were fiercely intelligent, intimidating, and would shut you down if you were wrong, no matter who or where you were. So as a result, their students developed thicker skin, and did away with their  own social appropriateness (or "good girl") filters. There is no doubt in my mind that these women will become the next generation of prolific publishers and researchers. Even I, after participating in seminars and discussions with them, (and generally being peer-mentored by them, if only by example and interaction) found my skin getting thicker and my filter fading away. Nowadays, I will come out and say it whenever I think anyone is wrong no matter who they are, and if they think I'm wrong, that's totally fine. When it comes down to it, I don't find many women being able to stick their necks out to the extent that these women did, and that's what you really need to be a scientist.