You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work

Come on now....

Brains and behavior are absolutely, absurdly, ridiculously complicated, at every level from individual ion channels on up to neurons, circuits, brain regions, and even between people.

It's true that there's a lot of hype, both from well-meaning folks who are excited about their results and cynically manipulative people trying to boost up their careers. It's true that the incentive and career structures are falling apart. But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies...

There is a cost to curiosity. Lack of focus. I had a real challenge in my career- I continuously ranged far afield in learning well beyond the direct subject areas of my network engineering career.

That often took away time I 'should' have spent directly researching problem areas applicable to my day job. It finally led me to separating with a company I had been with for 8 years and had a lot of close relationships with.

But what it did was put me on a path to actually use that store of knowledge. Now I'm a Network/Enterprise Architect and a key cog for my current CTO. I wasn't being used optimally previously but I also didn't make sure I was in the correct position that those skills/tendencies could be recognized and not be a hindrance. So much in life is in the framing of things- control that story, and your success is much more likely.

I would be very interested in reading about your process (e.g., what kinds of cards you make, what sort of questions you ask yourself, how this varies depending on the source or the subject, etc.).

Have you written about this in any detail somewhere? Or do you have links to resources you used to help learn how to do this?

> But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies

True. I have no doubt that it takes extreme-outlier-level intellect to fully grasp the mechanics of neuroscience.

But do you really believe that's it's due simply to misaligned incentives that there has not been a major breakthrough in psychiatry for so long?

Any researcher who made a huge breakthrough would be hailed as hero and should be able to enjoy vast career benefits.

Here's an alternate hypothesis: the experts in the field are so fixated on the mechanics of neurological function, that they can't think laterally and/or holistically about the problems, which is why those problems have continued to go unsolved after decades of research.

The idiom "can't see the forest for the trees" comes to mind.

My own experience is that I spent several years experiencing a combination of symptoms that psychiatry would diagnose with terms like depression, anxiety/panic disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD and personality disorder (narcissistic etc).

The psychiatric profession considers most of these conditions to be incurable, and really only treatable with long-term medication.

I wasn't willing to accept this, so I did my own research and ended up undertaking a combination of subconscious trauma-healing practices, along with nutritional work, exercise (yoga etc) and detoxification of heavy metals and hormone-disruptors.

After about 7 years undertaking these treatments, my symptoms are nearly all gone. Some still linger, but my treatment continues, as does the steady improvement.

Where are the researchers in the field looking into this kind of stuff? It's not as if it's not talked about by prominent figures within the biomedical field. Bruce Lipton, Gabor Maté, Rupert Sheldrake and Stan Grof have been talking about this stuff for a long time, and the hypotheses and anecdotes are right there waiting to be researched.

Sure, one might look at the incentives and career paths that keep most researchers focused on drug discovery and nothing else.

But a key part of being a ”brilliant” person involves a willingness to break ranks with the mainstream and find new explanations and solutions for persistent old problems.

I'd have to agree with your parent commenter that there doesn't seem to have been much of that in recent memory, at least from the psychiatric side of neuroscience.

> There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating a rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett etc, etc).

That's not really true. Once you are billionaire you can stay a billionaire for decades. Meanwhile most NBA players don't have long careers, many stay in the league only for a few years. I'd expect that over 10-20 years there have been more NBA players than billionaires.