"'I have to be totally still.' Ideas come floating up 'like a bubble in liquid.' At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas."
— Colapinto, John (b. 1958)
Author
Work Title
Date
May 18, 2015
Metaphor
"'I have to be totally still.' Ideas come floating up 'like a bubble in liquid.' At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas."
Metaphor in Context
Deisseroth seems never to be on tilt. He attributes this partly to his psychiatric training: "Those nights on call where there are five emergencies, you've got a patient in restraints in the E.R., where they need you immediately, patients up on the psychiatry floor, where someone punched a nurse--you develop a little bit of a 'just get through it one thing at a time.' " His unusual calm has allowed him to compartmentalize competing demands (fatherhood, marriage, neuroscience, literary endeavors, clinical psychiatry, speaking appearances at dozens of conferences a year), so that he can think through complex problems. He told me that, while many people find that walking or jogging shakes ideas loose from the subconscious, he needs to quell all physical activity. "Otherwise, I get this disruption from the motor cortex," he said. "I have to be totally still." Ideas come floating up "like a bubble in liquid." At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas.
(p. 78)
(p. 78)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
John Colapinto, "Lighting the Brain: Karl Deisseroth and the Optogenetics Breakthrough," The New Yorker (May 18, 2015). <Link to www.newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
06/13/2015
