Neuroscience/Psychiatry Interests
I tend to wonder about the inner workings of almost anything I encounter. However, my deepest interest lies in how humans function, or sometimes fail to function due to psychological illness or distress. Deciphering how and why the brain of a severely depressed, manic, or psychotic individual acts the way it does, fascinates me and is an area of research that I hope to contribute to. This interest in psychopathology extends to the etiology, prognosis, and treatment of all psychiatric illnesses that lead to suicidal ideation and planning, or psychiatric hospitalization.
Specific psychiatry-related neuroscience questions I often think about include: why do certain individuals respond well to certain medications or treatments while others do not? How is it that an individual can present with severe neurological symptoms while sophisticated neuroimaging indicate a perfectly intact brain? What neuroscience methods can be harnessed to identify and treat psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses? Finally, how can we improve upon existing research to improve early detection and prevention of psychopathology?
As a musician, auditory perception and processing have also been of particular interest. This curiosity about auditory perception fueled the development of my undergraduate thesis, examining factors that contribute to immersive emotional musical experiences. In this original survey-based quantitative experiment, our participants blindly rated their experiences using different types of studio headphones. We are still in the process of gathering data.
Broadly, I want to better understand what plagues the human mind, and what cures it. If music brings tranquility to the mind, why is that the case, and what aspects of it can we extract and apply to other aspects of life? Does biology alone determine psychological well-being outcomes? Or perhaps our environment plays more of a role than we might realize, and if so, we ought to place higher value on where and how we live. Are there aspects of brain functioning that we might be overlooking and what questions would help shed light on what gives rise to the many layers and colors of the human psyche?
Scientific questions that hold the most value to me emerge from a desire to reduce unnecessary human suffering. Hence, the one overriding question I wish science could answer is how to fully eradicate disease. In the case of psychiatric diseases, too many lives are lost every day to suicide. The pain of such incidents is carried by friends and family left behind, wondering if they could have handled things differently. I believe there is a path toward decreasing the current prevalence of suicide, and that neuroscience has a significant role to play in this endeavor.
It is therefore my ambition to better understand the biology behind mental illness in the hopes of getting one step closer to a world where individuals affected by mental illness can lead healthier and more productive lives. A world where the mentally ill are not cast away or judged based on attributions to spiritual or moral failures, but rather are accepted for who they are based on the humanity that we all share.