Biocomputer and changing beliefs/behaviors

Very simplistically, to Lilly’s way of thinking, all humans who reach adulthood are programmed biocomputers. However, we all have the capacity to “self-program” the biocomputer and therefore, create new programs and revise old programs. Since our reality is a creation of our beliefs, feelings, and thoughts, when we allow our self to open to the unknown, we release our self from what we already think, feel, and believe. When there is a field of “emptiness” where we are able to see space rather than barrier, new possibilities can emerge; we are free to go beyond our limiting beliefs.

We need to think about beliefs that are imposed and that leave no room for an alternative perspective or point of view. Think about all of the things you were overtly or covertly instructed to avoid; how much of your behavior was modified, or even extinguished. (Of course, some conditioning is necessary for the purposes of survival and socialization.) The messaging could run as deep as an absolute prohibition carrying severe punishment, real or imagined if not obeyed, to a milder form, such as disapproval or pressure to comply and conform, which, nonetheless, is very limiting.

Lilly constructed a series of ordered questions meant to challenge held beliefs, and to effectively change them. You ask yourself the questions and you answer the questions, much as you would do with a therapist. Think of this exercise as a way to “self dialogue”.

So, try this exercise. Choose any issue, attitude, behavior, even bad habit that you want to address and ask these questions.

 What are my goals when I engage in this behavior/way of thinking, feeling, believing, or acting? In other words, what am I getting out of doing it?

 By what means can I stop this behavior? What do I need to do in order to stop thinking, acting, behaving this way?

 What is my relationship with other people and the way I utilize that relationship that allows me to continue this behavior, or to stop this behavior? This is a point often not considered. People that we hang out with may hold the same attitudes or beliefs and there may be pressure from the group not to change.
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 Am I capable of stopping this behavior? In other words, how do I know I can stop?

 What is my orientation, when I engage in this behavior, or when I stop this behavior? Where is this behavior leading me in either case?

 What do I have to eliminate in order to stop this behavior? What behavior(s) and /or people do I need to let go in order to stop doing what I’m doing?

 What do I have to assimilate to stop this behavior? What must I absorb/adopt to change this conditioned behavior?

 What must I do to bring my impulses in line with stopping this behavior? How do I extinguish the impulses/desire that perpetuates the behavior? When the impulse arises can I delay gratification? Can I substitute another thought or action in place of the impulse?

 What are my needs when I engage in this behavior and when I stop this behavior? Do I really need this behavior or just want or like having it? What habitual activities that support this behavior must be eliminated?

 What are the other possibilities in relationship to this behavior? What positive behaviors can potentially replace old negative patterns of behavior?

 What is the form this behavior takes? Describe detail by detail how this behavior is carried out on an ongoing basis. Is this behavior really important to your being? (If this is hard using an issue of your own choosing to work with, then use the example of smokingand the desire and goal to quit. Step by step think about all of the activities centered around smoking, not just smoking itself---people you hang out with that smoke, leaving the office for smoking breaks, hours thinking about cigarettes, anxiety about running out of cigarettes, and on and on.)

 What is the substance of this behavior? What does this negative, limiting (and sometimes potentially dangerous) behavior/attitude/belief really have to do with who I am?

Lilly addressed inner realities by constructing a model that included the old reality as well as the new one. In essence, this critical, but honest questioning of one’s motivation and behavior creates a new program; one that exposes the negative side of the behavior, lifts limitations, creates new possibilities, and changes behavior for the good.

The reason why I did not want to do research work...

Not mine, it's a cut of someone else's blog post but I can't credit right now cuz their site is all jacked up..

One curious thing about my life are my cyclic bursts of energy and motivation.  Every few years, it seems that I subconsciously get bored with some aspect of my life and suddenly undertake a variety of ambitious and extended projects.  The most recent of these, I think, involved my stopping at a music store one day after work on a whim and signing up to take guitar lessons.  The first I recall was near the end of my undergraduate years.

I did my undergraduate work as a physics major at the University of Chicago.  For a large portion of my life, I’ve been a rather passive individual, “going with the flow” without making big efforts to achieve my own dreams.  For example, in my junior year, I remember meeting one of my first-year professors on the quad.

“Still a physics major?” he asked.

“Yeah, I can’t think of anything better to do,” I replied, which sort of ended the conversation.

My statement was bitter, but rather honest; somewhere in the back of my mind I was convinced that I was carrying on a physics degree until I found my true calling, whatever it was.  Nearing the end of that junior year, though, I realized that I needed to get more involved if I was even to continue in physics in grad school.

I exploded into action: I got myself a summer job in an experimental particle physics research group, and made plans to do an (optional) senior physics thesis which would graduate me with honors.  I decided to become a physics tutor, and I took up two martial arts, karate and aikido, on the side. I agreed to be a student marshal, which meant that I would help out at graduation, and I even volunteered to be a resident assistant in my dorm.  (Sometime around then I also started working at GenCon gaming convention, which went on for seven years, but that’s another story.)

I had a good time doing my thesis.  I ended up constructing and testing, from someone else’s design, an analog electronic circuit which could measure the energy output of a particle calorimeter.  The analog design was discarded in favor of the digital version, but I still learned a lot.  I had a great post-doc directly advising me, who I can credit with breaking me of a lot of bad habits (such as saying “I understand” when I didn’t understand), and was indirectly supervised by the head of the project, one of those people who is very nice but, by virtue of his intelligence and authority, scared the hell out of everyone.  (He once walked by the lab, poked his head in to say, “Hi!” and I nearly hit the ceiling.)

After graduation, I stayed on in the lab for another year and then applied to graduate school, and got accepted to the University of Rochester.  I did a TA for a year and then settled into working with an advisor doing experimental particle physics.

Things kind of drifted along aimlessly then for a while, and I gradually started to lose my enthusiasm over particle physics.  Part of this was the environment: I went from a school very strong in particle physics (Chicago) to a school very strong in optics, and the enthusiasm level just didn’t seem as high for the particle stuff.  Part of this was due to the recent demise of the SSC (superconducting super collider), which was supposed to fill the role that CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider now holds: discovering new physics through unprecedented high-energy collisions.  I actually was a “fly on the wall” during one of the strategy discussions when the UofC physicists were deciding how to convince Congress to save the accelerator.  Around the time I started graduate school, particle physics felt a bit like it had the wind knocked out of it.

Lots of little things started to drive me nuts, though it is important to keep in mind that I was suffering from clinical depression and very little would have made me happy back then.

I spent one day in the accelerator tunnels assisting an engineer during his inspection of the accelerator beamline.  When he found an area which wasn’t quite level, he would use a crowbar to force a pipe high enough to stuff a shim underneath it — not exactly what I was expecting!  At one point during the inspection, he had to give a quick ten-minute tour of the lab to visitors, and told me to wait in the tunnel.

There were no chairs down there, so I started looking for somewhere along the wall where I could prop myself and wait.  But everywhere along the beamline, there were these little chalkboards, marked with the dosage of radiation I would get by standing in their vicinity.  I walked probably half of the tunnel looking for a non-radioactive part of the tunnel, to no avail!  To be fair, the radiation level was essentially negligible for the amount of time I was spending there, but it did make me wonder whether I liked the work enough to get any extra radiation exposure.

Part of the difficulty of getting involved in particle physics is the rather steep learning curve: the physics is very non-intuitive and the techniques are elaborate.  Searching for new physics requires first learning to interact with a massive catalog of simulated collision events.  By working with this data set, one can develop a set of “cuts” which will in principle eliminate all the false positives and only leave those events which represent the new physics.  Even then, one needs a very good understanding of statistics to interpret whether or not the detected results are statistically relevant or not.

One day, after having worked for months on developing a great set of cuts to search for “rare-B” decays (rare, non-standard model decays of the bottom quark that would represent new physics), I proudly showed off my proposed cuts to one of the post-docs working on the project.  His response, in effect, was: “Don’t put too much faith in that simulation catalog.  We know it’s not very accurate.”  WTF?  Then what was I doing working with it for all that time???

Particle physics experiments are massive undertakings that require a large group working in collaboration to build and maintain both the detector and accelerator.  One necessary side effect of this is that research results end up being published with the entire group as co-authors, and the groups can be ridiculously large: the CDF collaboration, which discovered the top quark at Fermilab, had at the time some 300 members.  To my mind, I was just as troubled by the possibility of other people co-authoring (and taking credit for) my work as I was by the possibility of my name being associated with work I had no direct role in.

The final straw for me, though, was:

THE TUBE!!!!!

I, or more accurately, my advisor, was assigned the task of testing a prototype for the inner tube of the new detector’s drift chamber.  A particle detector is built around the “tunnel” the particles travel through.  The particles collide head-on in the center of this detector, and charged particles produced in the collision scatter out through the drift chamber, a large collection of densely packed, highly-charged wires (via NobelPrize.org):

The charged particles are detected by the wires, and a powerful magnet curves the trajectories of the particles, allowing a measurement of their momentum.  A sample event measured by the CDF detector is shown below (via DOE Pulse):

The wire chamber is in a vacuum — the wires would discharge in air — so the 12-inch diameter inner cylindrical wall of the chamber must be airtight.  It must also be temperature resistant (the wires get hot), and must be precisely round to within around a 100 micron tolerance, which is the distance of the closest wires to the wall.  We received a prototype carbon fiber tube, and it became my job to test the damn thing.

For. A. Whole. Year.  It took FOREVER to do the measurements.  It is very difficult to set up and operate a system to measure the roundness of a 1-meter long, 12-inch diameter tube to micron precision — and wasn’t even close to round.  It also leaked air profusely.  The final straw, after a year of measurement, was to put a small slice of it into an oven at 100 degrees and see what happened.  The thing came out a hugely distorted ellipse!  The tube, like my undergraduate circuit project, ended up not being used.

At that time, I started reflecting on my career.  I had just spent most of the year measuring a TUBE!  I couldn’t imagine how that would look on my future resume.  I was frustrated, and didn’t think my career was going anywhere.

It was then that I had another one of my bursts of ambition.  Like many young physicists, I had gotten into science with the dream of becoming a theoretical physicist.  Why, then, had I ended up in experimental work?  Partly it was due to inertia — I was following the path that started with my undergraduate particle physics job.  Partly, though, I realized that going into a large experimental physics group was my way of “playing it safe” and finding a career where I felt I could “hide” amongst a crowd.

I emphasize again that this isn’t the way particle physics works — rather, it was my rather immature and inaccurate view of the way it works.  Nevertheless, I realized that I really wanted to do theoretical work, and wondered how to make it happen.

I was lamenting my state to a classmate in Taco Bell a short time later and he suggested that I could possibly work for his advisor, a distinguished theoretician.  I joined the research group and started life as a theoretical optics researcher.  My work was no longer the “fundamental” physics I had originally aspired to, but I found that I loved it nevertheless.

This wasn’t the end of my troubles, of course; theoretical work has its own downsides.  A few years later, with my grad work floundering, I had another burst of energy and took up skating, skydiving, long-distance running and kung fu.  A few years after that, I got treated for my depression, and a final burst of energy got me graduated and on my way to Amsterdam to postdoc.

If there is some bigger point to this post, I guess I should direct it to aspiring scientists.  When choosing a field of research, you should consider whether not only the topic of study but also the methodology is something you enjoy.  Also, make sure you choose a research field because it is truly what you want to do, and not simply what you are doing to “play it safe.”