On the website, I focus on how to foster your individual ability to make scientific discoveries.  It’s your individual contribution that’s emphasized, even if you work as part of a team, group, or formal collaboration.  If you’ve read many of my posts, you will know that I have so far divided aspects of an individual’s discovery ability into four major themes (which I use as tags to categorize The Scientist’s Log blog posts): activities, knowledge, mindset, and skills.

Let me take an opportunity in this post to clarify how I define these themes, how I think they support scientific discovery, and, most importantly, tell you which one I think every discoverer should focus on and why.

 

Knowledge is recognizing what you don’t know

 

This may sound counterintuitive, but, when you’re pursuing scientific discovery, obtaining a good stockpile of knowledge is really about recognizing all the things you don’t know.

Let’s do a little experiment:

Below I’ve listed three questions.  Read them over and then decide which question you think is most likely to lead to a breakthrough scientific discovery in the next 5 years:

 

1. Why and how to mice sing?
2. How do neutrino particles acquire mass?
3. Where did Amelia Earhart’s plane crash on her final flight?

 

Do you have a guess?  Okay.  Now stop and think about how you even began to tackle picking a question.  Did you have to stop and try to define words for yourself, like what does she mean by “sing”, or what is a “neutrino”?  Did you try and do a web search to read a few quick headlines from search results to see if any of the questions was a decoy, i.e., it has already been answered? (Did it even occur to you that I might include a trick question?)  And in trying to pick a question, were you struck by how you knew little or nothing about some or all of the topics behind the questions (biology and zoology for question 1; particle physics and mathematics for question 2; history, oceanography and aviation in question 3)?

All right.  Now, suppose I give you a different set of three questions and ask you to again decide which question you think is most likely to lead to a breakthrough scientific discovery in the next 5 years:

 

1. What’s the most efficient way to butter toast?
2. How can we teach self-driving cars to avoid hitting pedestrians?
3. Why are bee colonies vanishing at an accelerated rate?

 

Did you have a totally different reaction to this set of questions?  I’m willing to bet money you feel more comfortable with your response to this second set than you did with the first set.  Why?  Because most of us are much more knowledgeable about the second set of topics than the first set.  We have some of the necessary knowledge to help us make an assessment.  Whereas, in the first set of questions, we don’t know enough facts to begin to guess.

It’s not knowing the facts that’s important.  It’s knowing enough to know the limits of what the facts are and what they can tell you that counts.  Discovery is all about finding out something new.  That means discovery starts where the facts fizzle out.

So that’s why I emphasize knowledge as a key theme in productive scientific discovery efforts.  Knowledge is your perception and awareness of observations and facts about the world around you.  You have to know enough to recognize what you still don’t know; and you have to know enough to realize that the gaps in what you know matters to more people than just you.

 

Mindset is caring enough to find out what you don’t know

 

Of course recognizing that something important is unknown isn’t enough by itself.  We’ve all had conversations in our down time when we come up with brilliant questions, ideas, or inventions while talking or joking around with friends or family over a coffee or a beer.  But when the conversation ends, so does our interest in following up on that spark of insight.

And these sparks are also often inspired by suddenly commiserating on how the facts or inventions have failed to help make our lives or day better or easier at some key moment.

But if, when we reach that moment of recognition, we just stop at commiserating (when we’re with others) or musing (when we’re alone), then discovery would never happen.  That spark has to light an intense caring inside you; a desire to fill that gap or invent that bridge between where the world is and where you would like the world to be.

That’s why mindset is another core theme for scientific discovery.  Mindset is the intention you hold inside about what to do with your knowledge.  Your intention has to be to pursue discovery.  Discovery won’t pursue you.  Without the right mindset even if you happen to find yourself in a discovery moment you might pass it by without realizing it, or worse, think it’s too much hassle to follow-up on.

 

Skills are procedures you use to channel caring into doing

 

“Discovery awaits the mind that pursues it,” as the saying goes here at The Insightful Scientist.  “Pursue” is a big, wide-open word.  It’s a word that is made into something concrete through skills.

Skills are what you do to put your mindset into practice.  For example, if you value adapting ideas from one field to another then you read widely in different fields; or if you believe that trying it out as soon as possible to get real time feedback is key, then you will become adept at building prototypes or toy models.

I always think of skills as a carefully choreographed sequence of things you do with your body and mind in order to achieve some outcome.  The example that always comes to mind for me is actually skill I never perfected, fishing.

My ever patient grandfather, who loved to fish and did so constantly after he retired, tried very hard to pass the skill on to me starting when I was young.  He bought me my first fishing pole as a gift when I was around 4 years old.  It was a tiny, little kid’s special pole, white and pink.  I thought it was awesome, although I wasn’t too sure about the scary sharp looking hook.

The first time I tried to cast the line by myself, after a suitable instruction session from my grandpa, I swung the pole back and then forward hearing the reel make a gravelly unwinding sound.  I started to try and tighten the line when I heard my grandfather say in a very calm but firm tone, “Looky here Bern, stop what you’re doing.  Don’t move.  Now turn around real slow.  And don’t jerk the line.”

I was always the kind of little kid who was a goody two shoes, so I followed instructions, and turned around slowly.

It turns out I had embedded my hook in my grandfather’s head when I had swung it back to cast it.

Now I would like to say that this story ends well and that I became more skilled as I grew up and spent vacations with my grandpa.  Not so much.  I did learn not to hook people on the back swing.  But instead I developed a knack for catching anything but edible fish on my line, losing the hooks, or having to cut the line (and once almost losing the fishing pole when a fish took the bait and nearly jerked it out of my hands).

I caught baby sharks, by accident.  I caught sting rays, by accident.  I caught pufferfish, by accident.  I was supposed to be catching catfish and flounder and other things my grandpa would cook up in a bountiful fish fry.  But I never got the skill right; I never moved my bait just so, with the right pacing of movements and flicks of the wrist.  My fishing was like someone breaking dancing badly in the middle of a slow waltz.  My choreography was just all wrong.

So that’s skills.  Skills are being able to coordinate your mental focus and physical movements to choreograph a sequence of actions that earn you your desired result.  Without scientific discovery skills you can’t infuse your intention with action.  Nothing will get done, nothing will get discovered.

 

Activities are tasks you complete to finish skilled procedures

 

Of course skills are complicated.  Like I said, they are a little like choreography and emphasize moving through a whole sequence.  They are a whole chain of actions and thoughts moving together toward a desired outcome.  But it’s impossible to learn or master, let alone perfect, such a complicated procedure without breaking it down into small, doable tasks.

Those tasks are what I have called activities.  Activities are the ten to twenty minute bursts of really focused intention and action that you take to accomplish one thing small thing.  The key is, activities focus on the one small thing, while skills try to pull off the whole big project.

In traditional science education we teach a set of skills related to scientific discovery, such as using statistics, handling scientific equipment, solving math problems, and scripting code.  In traditional science practice we learn a few more skills related to scientific discovery, such as how to critique methodology, writing presentations, pitching ideas for funding, and supervising others to carry out assigned activities.

We usually refer to these as hard skills (i.e., technical skills training) and soft skills (i.e., professional skills training).

But somewhere in there, if part of our goal is to make a scientific discovery, has to be some room for discovery-centric activities.  How do you type-up a one year discovery roadmap?  What sections and topics do you need to create and maintain in a discovery researcher’s notebook?  When you read about the top ten scientific discoveries in a given year, what information about how they were achieved do you need to jot down and follow-up on in order to acquire new skills, new knowledge, and more mindset hacks?

These are all activities.  Activities are where we live the day-to-day of our jobs and lives.  So it’s no surprise that activities are also where our discovery paths lie waiting.

 

Skills are the bridge between a Dreamer and a Discoverer

 

So which of these themes—knowledge, mindset, skills, and activities—do I think is the most important for scientific discovery?  In other words, if you are short on time or the stakes are high then which theme should you hold on to while you let go of the others?

My personal choice would be skills.  Skills are the balance point between the big picture and the details.  By focusing on skills you keep both in sight.  And skills are the point at which discovery stops being a noun and starts being a verb.

I think you should go after skills first because they will carry you the farthest toward your goal.  There’s an interesting idea currently popular among the life hacking crowd that you should pursue a 1% change every day in order to see significant improvement over the course of time, rather than trying to improve by, say, 30% all at once.  The idea is that the 1% changes are easier to stick with, but just as valuable if you actually stick to doing them consistently.  In contrast, sometimes if we make the 30% change we fall off the wagon too quickly and the benefits don’t stick.

So if you’re looking for your 1% on scientific discovery, I would say go after skills.  Try to define discovery-centric skills.  Try to model discovery-centric skills.  Try to practice discovery-centric skills.  Even if it’s just for 1% of your day (and if you work for a typical 8 hours a day, that’s only a whopping 4.8 minutes of your time).

Of course. You don’t want to neglect the other themes in the long run, but I think you’re best bet of seeing meaningful improvement will come if you invest your time in your discovery skills.

I’m developing a vision for The Scientist’s Repertoire (previously called How-to Articles, and before that The Physicist’s Repertoire) to help you and I focus on this crucial skills component.  Because skills are like both spring water and a water well for scientific discovery: they are a spontaneous, natural source of fresh new energy and a man-made reserve of  fluid resources.  Emphasizing skills can give us a wellspring of ability to power our pursuit of discovery.

 

Interesting Stuff Related to This Post

 

1. James Clear, “Marginal Gains: This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1% and Here’s What Happened,” online article at jamesclear.com, excerpted from his book Atomic Habits, https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains.
2. Ranker’s crowd-sourced list “The Greatest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2018,” https://www.ranker.com/list/scientific-breakthroughs-of-2018/ranker-science.

 

Related Content on The Insightful Scientist

 

Blog Posts:

• The Physicist’s Repertoire
• Three Keys
• Good Things Come in Threes

 

 

How to cite this post in a reference list:

 

Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Spring and Well”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, August 27, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/spring-and-well.

 

[Page feature photo:  Radium Springs in Albany, Georgia in the United States.  Photo by Timothy L Brock on Unsplash.]