Resolution of learning

Forget this 'big picture' stuff, I'm focusing on the small things in life. Will this get me through the confusion and isolation that has engulfed me since starting my PhD?

Today I went to an all-day seminar on microscopy techniques. Intended for beginners, I felt right at home! But even considering this, the pace of the seminar was fairly rapid, and by 4pm I felt like I had a warm, wet towel wrapped tightly around my brain. With all the talk of 'photons', 'diffraction', and 'resolution limits', I was glad that I'm not an absolute beginner to the topic, as I would've really struggled.

I pondered how satisfying learning is. Not during that initial period when you're struggling desperately to find some vague outline in the blur seen down a poorly focused microscope. That period is definitely not satisfying! No, the good part comes when you've heard the same thing over and over from different people enough times, so that two sentences that you previously thought contradicted each other now make perfect sense. As if you've taken hundreds of poorly exposed images of the same cell and overlaid them so that suddenly it all becomes clear.

For at least a small fraction of the day, I felt this feeling of 'learning elation'. Unfortunately however, it was often followed by periods of confusion when I thought of new questions about the topic that I still couldn't answer. Maybe all that I've done is push my 'resolution of understanding' barrier back a few notches.

It seems to me that no matter how well you know a topic, you could still hear something in a different way, or gain a new factoid that slips into a minute gap in your understanding. Learning is a drug, and if I knew how to bring it into focus when I'm feeling down, then my life might become clearer.

We ended the day with some practical examples of live cell imaging. As I watched these living cells moving around the culture dish in the ultimate home-made video, I wished I could see the neurons inside my brain talking positively to each other.