SCItations

Scenario: You’re listening to one of your favorite pieces.   Suddenly some cue in the music makes your heart feel like it might beat out of your chest and your skin start to tingle. Within seconds your arm hairs are standing straight up, a wave of chills runs down your spine and you are covered in goose bumps. The first time this happened to me I think I was about 12 singing along to a hymn from the pew of my church. I thought for sure what I was feeling was the Holy Spirit coursing through my veins! Not to write off any divine experience my 12-year old self was having, but it turns out that there were some other things going on – mostly in my brain. It’s been known for a while now that lots of human behavior is reinforced by activity in our brains that makes us feel good. For the most part these feelings of pleasure are meant to encourage us to keep doing things that tend to help our species survive, i.e. having sex or eating delicious food (although highly addictiv...

As a chem major, I get way too excited about talking to random people about chemistry. Today for example, I had a field day explaining to my barista why her chemistry teacher sometimes says hydrogen has a +1 charge and sometimes says all the elements on the periodic table are neutral.   When I talk to non-chemists about chemistry, it makes me feel all tingly inside. Does this mean that I am meant to be a pre-school teacher? Is it because I have a power complex and enjoy feeling like I know more than everyone else? Do all pre-school teachers have power complexes?  I prefer to think that my excitement is born from my strong belief in the power of critical thinking, reasoning, and of course, the scientific method. Communicating the importance of these tools to non-believers, skeptics or those that just can’t be bothered seems to me to be a noble endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good skeptic. In fact, skepticism is one of the qualities I think all good scientists ...