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Career... advice?

Back in June, someone over on Quora specifically asked a question of me: "What advice would Bradley Voytek give to undergraduates on studying and researching neuroscience?"


But the beauty of hindsight is that its glasses are often rose-tinted. So I sat down an answered as best I could while trying to avoid platitudes and cliches. My full response is below.

This is a really tough question, because it's so broad. I'm not really sure how to answer it. Because I'm more of a cognitive/systems/computational neuroscientist, I'll approach my answer from that direction.

My wife and I were talking about this recently after watching Freakonomics. She was asking me what classes I was good at in high school. I was a great high school student without really trying to be, but I quickly became a bad college student, mostly because I started learning how to socialize.

What happened to me, I think, was that once I started doing poorly in college while my friends continued to succeed, I started to think I wasn't cut out for college. I started to think I was a hack.

Only much later would I learn of something called "impostor syndrome".


So my first few pieces of advice will be academically related, but not neuroscience specific.


It's for that last reason that I've been including an entire section in my CV (PDF) called "Failures and Rejections" that includes rejected grant applications, rejected publications, rejected grad school applications, etc.




Networking is sharing, not manipulating.


Ok, now the neuroscience specific advice.

Most importantly, I'd have to say not to buy into the false belief that many neuroscientists seem to carry that somehow we actually know what the brain is doing.

Understand that most neuroscientific "facts" are inherently making statistical, not factual, statements. Broca's area is probably involved in language production, insomuch as there is a brain region that can be clearly identified as "Broca's area" in any one given person. There's a reason why neurosurgeons do electrical stimulation mapping prior to tissue resection. (See Are all the wrinkles on a brain's cortex the same across people?)

Think critically about any statements you encounter in the neuroscientific literature and in your own thinking; e.g.:
  • What does it *mean* for a brain region to be "involved in a task"?
  • Can you have neural correlates of a behavior without needing that neural region?
  • How are the researchers operationalizing "attention", "memory", "emotion", etc.? Are they measuring what they say they're measuring?
  • What does a neuron do? Seriously. Think about this one hard.
  • Look to the literature *before* you start your research. A lot of cool single-unit work was done in the 1960s and 70s that's been forgotten.
  • But don't mistake old research as Truth, either.

I could do this all day, but hopefully this will give you a feel for what I think is important in terms of how I approach my research.

I've written a few pieces of neuroscience skepticism before as well, if you want to delve deeper. For example: "How to be a neuroscientist".

Feel free to email me if you want to know anything more specific. I'm always happy to chat.

Final piece of advice:

Everything I've said is anecdotal experience about my own life and my own path, and thus should be treated with as much skepticism as anything else.


CDC, zombies, and Comic-Con

Just a quick update this afternoon.

First, if you haven't seen the new zombie work by the CDC, check it out! It's from the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. Posters were available for free, but they appear to be out of stock now...

You can still download very high-res versions, however.

Next, my interview video with Wired from Comic-Con has been posted online! I have to say I was pretty uncomfortable. I was extremely busy and stressed from work at the time, and took a quick trip downstairs from my hotel room to check out the Wired party that my friend (and Wired writer) Angela invited me to.

Five minutes later I was in a tent off from the main pool party area getting interviewed. I'm just wearing a dirty white t-shirt, and I'm clearly not in my element.

The article's nice though, so I can't complain!






Bradley Voytek WTF



Instead, I got this unethical marvel.







(All emphases in this post's quotations are mine.)




You stay classy, history of psychiatry.












So what does Heath do next?




But wait! There's more!











He goes on:




