5 Lessons I Learned From My Neuroscience Degree
By: Isaac Wu
Tags: Neuroscience, Education, Psychology, Science, Life Lessons

5 Lessons I Learned From My Neuroscience Degree

A call to celebrate with reflection in the absence of convocation.

I just graduated with a degree in Neuroscience without a plan to go to med school or grad school.

“Then what do you want to do with that?” People would always ask.

“Learn about the brain.”

That was my answer every time. To me, a degree was always a gem of knowledge before it was a stepping stone. I hope my fellow graduating class of 2020 feel that way about their degrees too — we need to, now more than ever.

With jobs and internships blasted to smithereens, convocations cancelled, and glamorous grad trips put on hold, graduation must take on a new meaning. It must be a reflection on the gems of knowledge we gained from our degrees: the lessons learned that will forever change the way we look at, live in, and leave the world. Here are 5 lessons I learned from my Neuroscience degree.

Lesson 1 — Let Your Parents Take Pictures: Episodic Memory is the First to Go

I used to get annoyed when my mom wanted to take a selfie with us. I don’t any more.

“Why now?” we’d all ask as she whipped out her phone.

“To remember this!” she’d say.

As I studied aging and memory, I began to realize how good of a reason that really was.

Generally, most of us can achieve “healthy aging” by learning new skills, being creative, and thinking and working in different ways. We can sail into the sunset of life with relative sharpness of mind, and even memory. For example, we won’t forget how to drive a car or brush our teeth because our procedural, or “muscle”, memory remains in good shape. Semantic memory — memory for facts — doesn’t suffer much either, and can even get better as we age (think about your last game of trivia with mom and dad). One type of memory, however, is not immune to aging: episodic memory.

Episodic memory, or memory for personal experiences, is shown to decline in accuracy as we get older. So, while my mom may be able to mince garlic, drive to Costco, and name the singer of Suspicious Minds with ease, she may not always remember what she ordered on the second time we went to that Ramen place in Palo Alto, and who was there. But a cue, like a picture, can be the magic wand for recalling the night a few siblings and I slurped away with her just down the street from Stanford.

Lesson 1. Be patient with your parents when they can’t remember the little things, and support their requested selfies so they can.

Lesson 2 — Play Cards With Everyone : Remembering What Makes Us, Us

If you were observing the beginning of a card game, you wouldn’t judge the players by their starting hands.

We’ve all been dealt a hand of cards. This hand isn’t chosen and doesn’t change. This hand is unique to us and has certain strengths and weaknesses. This hand is our genes.

Understanding the relationship between genes and behavior has changed the way I interact with others. Looking back at the times I discriminated against people because of their behavior, I could very well have been doing so because of their genes. I have been guilty of judging card players by their starting hands.

“Why is she overreacting?” I’d ask. “I wish he wasn’t so impulsive,” I’d think. I later learned in Behavioral Neuroscience that slow stress recovery and impulsivity are sometimes results of specific gene variants — a specific card in one’s hand. I learned that one fourth of the population holds the slow-acting variant of COMT, which is an enzyme that aids in stress recovery. It turned out all the “over-reactors” I was so quick to label were just working with a unique card in their hand. Then I learned that a certain variant of the DRD4 gene, held by around 20% of the population, is implicated in addiction, impulsivity, higher risk-taking and even schizophrenia. Come to think about it, all those people I thought were “impulsive adrenaline junkies” had been dealt a joker at the beginning of the game.

Other behaviors can hardly be traced back to a single gene, but follow the “common variant” model. Autism follows this model, wherein a certain “recipe” of common gene variants may be the culprit. Individuals with autism might have a 5 of diamonds, an 8 of spades, and a jack of hearts — common cards all of us hold. But that specific combination may be just the one to produce the set of behaviors we’ve come to define as “autism.”

While I never dared call an autistic person weird, I was no stranger to passing that judgment on “normal” people I found socially clumsy. Understanding the neurobiology of autism (or lack thereof) called for a shift in paradigm: “autism” is a set of traits, just like any other set of traits produced by any given hand of common cards. If every single person could have their genotype mapped and behavior closely observed, we would find more correlations between certain behavior sets and gene variant combinations. Then everyone would have a “disorder.” So if today I run into someone I’m tempted to call weird, annoying, or anything else, I can remember that these traits are the results of unique card combinations, a lot like the ones in my own hand.

Now, you’d might as well rescind my degree if I were claiming we were all puppets of our DNA. If there is any certainty in neuroscience, it’s that our brains are plastic: we can change the way experiences and genes have programmed us to think and behave (more on that in Lesson #4). A DRD4 holder can learn to tame his impulsivity. Someone with the slower COMT variant can work to reframe her stressors. And those who behave a little differently in social situations can find confidence and connection in society. Nevertheless, everyone has to start — and end — with the genes they’ve been dealt, and only time, experience, and patience can help us fulfill the potential therein.

Lesson 2. Never judge a player by their starting hand and play fairly with everyone — we’re all learning to play our cards right.

Lesson 3 — The Best Way to Do Dishes : Letting Dish Soap Do Its Job.

Photo by Odua Images

Imagine you had to learn how to wash dishes all over again, but this time only through observation. You’d soon find there are different styles.

You may enjoy the efficiency of the filler-uppers, who turn their sink into a soapy swimming hole for the evening. The brute-forcers might excite you as they pour soap straight onto the dish and scrub frantically under a running faucet. But understanding the chemistry may call you down a different path.

Soap cleans dishes — I didn’t need a chemistry class to tell me that. What I did need it to tell me was how. Water — a polar molecule — and grease — a nonpolar molecule — don’t mix. This is where dish soap comes in. Soap is an amphipathic molecule: it’s both polar and nonpolar. It can grab the grease and hold on with its nonpolar tail as its polar head follows water down the drain. Understanding this, we can see how soap can’t possibly do its thing when violently swished around in a pool or under a waterfall. It needs to do its job in steps: 1) bind to the grease, 2) get washed down the drain.

Lesson 3: The best way to wash dishes is a quick rinse to remove the leftover food scraps followed by a soapy scrub sans water, and then a thorough rinse under the faucet. “Wash, rinse, repeat,” simple. But for me, it’s now a simplicity that isn’t blind. For me, the magic of dish soap is, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a “simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.”

Lesson 4 — Why “It’s Not Good For Man to Be Alone”: On Potentiation and Proximity.

Photo by ZoomSpectrum

“Marketing degrees are useless.”

“He’s just following the crowd.”

“She’s just doing that because…”

“Musical Dance Theatre majors are wasting their time.”

Left alone, I would think thoughts like these. Left alone for longer, I would start to believe them. This is the dark side of potentiation, or how thoughts become “ingrained” in our brains. Understanding potentiation helped me break unhealthy trains of thought, and build healthier ones. To understand potentiation, however, you’ll need a crash course in neuroanatomy.

A rake is a great model for a neuron. The teeth of the rake represent the dendrites, the receiving end of a neuron. These dendrite “teeth” converge onto the head of the rake, which represents the cell body, a control center that processes input from the dendrites. From the head protrudes the long rake handle representing the axon, or “giving” end of the neuron. If the cell body “decides” to send a message to the next cell, it shoots an electrical impulse — an action potential — down the axon. The axon then communicates to the dendrite of the next cell. If you string a bunch of rakes together end-to-end, with the handle of one rake feeding into one of the teeth of the next, you have a neural pathway.

The first time I thought, “marketing degrees are useless,” an entire neural pathway fired. Zooming into the connections, or synapses, between neurons in the pathway, we can begin to understand how our thoughts become potentiated.

Take the first neuron in the pathway: when an action potential shot down its axon and reached the end, it released chemicals — neurotransmitters — that travelled across the synapse toward the dendrite of the second neuron. When the dendrite received the neurotransmitter, it sent input to its cell body, much like one of the skinny teeth of a rake feeds into the head. As I kept thinking, “marketing degrees are useless,” the cell body continued to receive input from this dendrite and charge began to build up. When the amount of charge reached a threshold, the cell body shot an action potential down its axon to communicate to the next cell, but this had repercussions. An action potential did not only shoot forward, down the axon rake handle, but also backwards, throughout the dendrite teeth in the form of a backpropagating action potential. So long as I kept thinking “marketing degrees are useless” without interruption, one of these teeth was still busy receiving input from the first neuron.

When the action potential of the first neuron met the backpropagating action potential of the second at their synapse, potentiation ensued: the connection between the first and second neuron was strengthened. The first now released neurotransmitter with every thought, the second neuron was more sensitive to that neurotransmitter, and as a result, it became a lot easier for me to think that marketing degrees were useless.

Until of course, I talked to a marketing student, and learned a new idea that would prove valuable at work.

I thought my neighbor was just following the crowd until I talked to him on the way to church and learned his genuine motivations.

I was sure why my friend was acting irritated until she told me otherwise.

I was so convinced that Musical Dance Theatre majors were wasting their time until I interviewed one.

It turns out, Musical Dance Theatre majors spend multiple days understanding the inner world of character they dance, sing, and act on behalf of. They do what I hadn’t done: get proximate to those who so desperately need their understanding.

Students of the Bible agree that when the Creator stated, “It’s not good for man to be alone,” he was hinting at a partner. But there’s another reason it’s not good for man to be alone: Partners and everyone else were meant to be loved, and when we are left alone to think about them, our thinking is flawed. When we are left alone for longer, we begin to believe ourselves.

Lesson 4: It’s not good for man to be alone because thoughts potentiate, so get proximate to others. Proximity will shatter your belief about someone and give you a chance to build something beautiful in its place.

Lesson 5 — Mercy Softens, Trust Ennobles.

A few weeks into my last semester, I made a realization. In response to it, I wrote the following email to my professor and meant it:

Hi Dr. ______, I made a mistake: I did not check the exam availability days. I assumed it ran for 4 days and thought I could still take it today. May I still take the exam, not for credit, but just as a benchmark for myself? I know you don’t allow exams to be taken home, so I can take it during a TA office hour or one of yours? Let me know what you advise. thank you, Isaac Wu

He said yes.

The morning of the exam, I was upset. My roommates had done something I couldn’t let go of. As I walked with my professor of Advanced Neuroscience to the empty computer lab, my mind hardened with grudges. As we neared the entrance, he spoke up and told me the test I was about to take was actually going to be for credit and that there were no penalties.

Every thought was silenced — something had changed inside.

I felt the muscles in my face relax.

I let go of the roommate thing.

I was softened.

He was letting me off the hook when he had every reason not to, and it stopped me cold. At that point, the points were immaterial: My accumulated GPA was high and essentially set in stone and I’d already had a job lined up. Nevertheless, his mercy had softened me.

I was getting my things settled when he spoke up again, saying that he needed to go teach another class, and I should slide my test under his door when I was finished. He then said, “I know there are so many ways you can cheat, and I know you won’t use them. Do great.” He slipped out the door and I was alone in the large computer lab. I completed my midterm in silence, with a pencil and nothing else. I did my absolute best — his trust had ennobled me.

I grabbed my phone and took the above picture. I wanted to remember this moment forever.

I didn’t need the picture. I would continue to put forth incredible effort in that class to learn everything I possibly could, to perform as well as I could, and to do it all with the utmost honesty. A few months later, I only needed a fifteen out of one hundred on my quarantined, un-proctored final to pass the class. With the COVID-converted grading system, anything above a C would be a “Pass” that wouldn’t affect my GPA. Still, I studied as if every future neurosurgery patient or grad school application depended on it, though I knew I’d never have either of the two.

He didn’t have to let me take the test for credit but he did.

He could’ve gotten someone to proctor but he didn’t.

Lesson 5: Mercy softens, trust ennobles.

Congrats, Grad.

These gems won’t lose their shine.

Because there are more selfies to be taken

…more card games to be played,

…more house chores to be enriched by a scientific lens,

…proximities to be enjoyed,

…mercy and trust to be given.

We are all graduating with something: a Neuroscience Degree at BYU, a marketing degree somewhere else (and a useful one at that!), more time at home with family. Whatever we emerge with during this world-wide pandemic is a graduation, a step toward a life more insightful and moral. Write down the lessons learned — these are the things worth celebrating. Congrats, Grad.

Your Fellow Graduate