“We jumped from zero to a hundred, and I was lost.”

This is the common sentiment I noticed even among some of the brightest students taking their first programming course. They show up to class, but much of the material goes over their heads unless they came in with prior knowledge of programming. Staying lost means that the time they spend in lectures is not used as effectively as it could be. The students then lose excitement about learning to program.

What happened?

What strategies can help people get the most out of the time they spend in programming lectures?

There are many programming courses and tutorials out there… but can you meta-learn programming? …

Stop banging your head against a textbook.

Four chapters into “MATLAB for Neuroscientists”, my friend asked me for advice. Her knowledge of psychology and neuroscience helped her a lot as an experimentalist, but with little background in mathematics or programming, my friend found herself slogging through the textbook. Feeling stuck in learning programming was all too familiar to me — although I read some programming books, took some programming classes, and successfully taught myself to build functional robots, it was AFTER these experiences when I gained strong reasoning abilities for programming. In retrospect, I could have saved at least a hundred hours of frustration if I knew what I know now about how to learn programming. …

Neural underpinnings of spatial navigation, with many illustrations and wordplays

Summary: The brain contains mechanisms that allow its owner to keep track of their position and movement through spaces. One way of navigating is by counting the number of steps taken. Another way is by creating internal maps of the external world. There are various brain regions and cell types that support navigation.

Where are we?

How do we know it?

Where are we going?

When considering the kingdom of critters on the planet, it seems that if animals have both a healthy brain and the ability to move around, they are able to find their way from place to place. …

Updated 10/27/2020

“It’s hard for a computer to know what a cup is,” said my lab mate.

His friends laughed at the statement— how could something so trivial to us humans be so hard for computers to understand? A cup is so simple that humans can accurately identify them from infancy. Most adults hardly have to think to process what is and what is not a cup. Technology is coming closer and closer to being able to take over many cognitively-demanding tasks. If a cup is hard for a computer to classify, then what about more complex classifications, such as recognizing emotional mismatches between a person’s tone of voice and their body language? …

Systematic approaches to make your best choice.

Updated 10.27.2020

Even if people are dealt the same cards, this does not mean they will play them in the same way. While cannot control outcomes, we can control the efforts we apply and the strategies we use. The trajectories of our lives strongly depends on the decisions we make. We can choose to dwell on the negative events of our lives or to tell ourselves that we are bigger than our problems. Many decisions do not have much importance because whichever choice is made does not have a strong effect on the outcome. For example, it does not matter much whether I choose to eat quinoa or oatmeal for breakfast. But there are larger decisions that we need to make in our lives: career decisions, decisions about who to spend our lives with, decisions about large purchases. The scientific method has a series of steps that can lead to conclusions. …

What mindset would be helpful for a person adopt when they train as a scientist? What will help them find happiness and fulfillment in this process?

“You’re going to become jaded over time. It happens to everyone.”

This is the gist of several conversations I had with graduate students before I started graduate school. In a world where loneliness abounds, where research funding can be hit-or-miss, where 90% of experiments fail, how can a trainee in science stay enchanted? What keeps them resilient through the ups and downs of the research process? I set out to inoculate myself against cynicism by talking with mentors, cultivating good relationships with my community, and performing scientific procedures that would benefit my lab mates’ projects along with my own. …