Zen of the lab bench

         Back in my primary school in Thailand, I had a mandatory 5 minute mediation session before class and after lunch at school, plus 1 hour meditation class on Wednesday.There are different variants of practices, mostly classified by where to focus our mind and how. The simplest one is probably to focus on the flow of air in and out from our noses through the bottom of our lungs..by counting our breathing cycles. Other variants focus our feeling at our feet as we walk in a circle..or at the moving flame at the tip of a candle.
          Meditation is like working out (but for the mind rather than the body); it is kinda torturing for the first few minutes..then after awhile.we no longer feel anymore pain..then after we finish we are tired but also feel so relaxed. The common thing I found across different types of practices to reach the "meditative state" of mind is that we keep doing simple and repetitive task over and over..you know.. breathing in and out, walking in a circle, staring at a flame, chopping woods, sweeping the floor, punching air..swinging a sword (you probably see the last three in typical kung-fu movies). We just keep focusing on that simple thing..at that moment.. and nothing else in the universe.
            Well, I recently found that I reached such meditative state of mind while I'm doing my routine tasks in the lab...preping DNA, pouring media plates,  inoculating cells, transferring small amount of liquid around with micro pipet. For almost every single days over the past 4-5 years (or more if you count my undergrad years which also involved these kinds of routine works), I have done all these over and over to the point that sometime I don't have to think about them..Athletes would call this "muscle memory." Many people found all these routine tasks very boring and waste of "valuable brain time" researchers should have spent mulling over higher level questions..like designing experiment or analyzing data. Yet, from time to time, I found that spending some time each day doing such routine task some how help me focus. Of course, I believe that designing experiment or analyzing data are probably more "important work" for researchers in the sense that such work cannot be outsourced to lab boys or robots. Still, it occurred to me pretty often that spending too much time at high level thinking make me feel like my brain is on fire. Sometime, even seemingly entertaining  activity...like meeting a bunch of friends at lunch..or joining networking events (see my other blog about networking) could also be very tiring... to much to think about impressing other people and all these etiquette bullsh*t...you know. Switching back to these so-call "boring and stupid tasks" help cool down my brain. It's the time when the whole world stops.. there are only me..a micropipet in my hand..and small amount of liquid to be moved around.

00.40 am, 27 October 2012, Palo Alto, CA USA