Go multidisciplinary PhD, young man!

About a month ago I started consulting a brilliant woman about refining my PhD research thinking.  She has come through the hard way, with a doctorate in the medical field, and pretty quickly concluded that I was at the inductive/expansive/complexity/holistic/integrative end of the scientific research conundrum and should be looking to do something across disciplines.

Yes indeed.

She also quickly concluded that my original research idea wasn't well-formed. Fair point.

So it's back to the drawing board.  Better to start of as right as possible than to get half-way through and find out it's wrong-headed.

Why a PhD is like a fractal - sort of

Thanks to a steer from Ellis Pratt I had a very informative conversation with Chris Atherton of the University of Central Lancashire - just what I needed.

Once I had outlined my putative PhD research proposal to her, she patiently and gently commented that as is so often the case, it was actually several projects.  We then went through it, peering into the constituent parts. 


Maybe this is one essential difference between post-grad academic work on a subject and work in the commercial sphere.  The commercial requirement is for a broad, eye-catching idea with lots of impressionist pieces to illustrate it.  The data has to be good enough to pass muster and build into an overall plausible proof of the starting hypothesis.  The academic work requires peering more deeply into single topic, defining the subject of investigation ever more tightly to and getting the best-possible data to get a provable representation of what's happening.

In praise of Professor Richard Ivry and iTunesU

iTunes has a very handy category of content called iTunesU where I found a series of Cognitive Neuroscience lectures by Professor Richard Ivry of UCB, aka University of California at Berkeley.

Not only is the content of the lectures very interesting and useful, but Rich Ivry's delivery is priceless.  It's a real incentive to listen back not only for the content, but also to get the nuances of his phrasing and rhythm and choice of words. You can hear one of the lectures with the slides here

I find myself repeating phrases back to see if I can get them just right, which I guess is a handy way of getting students to learn the materials.  Or maybe it's just me.

Narrowing down the field - it's a start

I know what I want to study and research, but it's taken a while to find out exactly what it's called.  There are a lot of disciplines and pseudo-disciplines that feature the word "neuro" in their name.  Anyway, the field I'm focusing glories in the handle "cognitive neuroscience".  It probably sounds like gobbledegook for most people but for me it's full of promise.

"Cognitive Neuroscience--With its concern about perception, action, memory, language and selective attention---will increasingly come to represent the central focus of all Neurosciences in the 21st century."

Now that's what I call right up my street. Let me at it!. 

"You don't wanna do that, mate"

Last Friday at my wife's graduation ball I was chatting with Marianna, one of her fellow GEPs (Graduate Entry Programme) - intense, off-the-scale brilliant with a degree in Chemistry from MIT and chosen to compete for the medicine Gold Medal in London this year.  She asked about my plans, I told her about my thinking on the PhD research project and she practically whooped on the spot.  She picked up the idea and ran with it.  Very energizing.

The following day I was at a BBQ and found myself in conversation with a guy who turned out to be a retired consultant psychiatrist.  He too asked about my plans, so I told him.   The response was very different.  If he had been a less elevated professional, he would have sucked through his teeth, shaken his head and said, "you don't wanna do that, mate."  As it was, he tilted his head back, raised his eyebrows and said "you'll have quite a lot of reading to do....."  I found his response quite discouraging at first.  Then talking further, I was surprised to find out that he didn't know the difference between PET scanning and fMRI scanning, two techniques for mapping brain activity. I came to the conclusion that either he was way behind the curve or else his area of speciality was different from what I'm looking at.

So far I've had four types of response to my idea.
1."What?"- (meaning "I don't understand and I'm not interested in understanding"
2. "Sounds interesting" - meaning "let's talk about something else"
3. "You'll have to do XX and have you read YYY?" - meaning "I already know loads about this subject"
4. "Wow - so you could do this thing and maybe that thing and how will you approach ZZZ?" - meaning "I understand and I'm interested"

How much am I thinking of biting off?

The University of Bath has an all-online system for making an application, and a very friendly IT guy to sort out any glitches.

The system asks for an academic reference and copies of degree and degree transcript.  I rang up Bath and pointed out that I graduated in 1978, so most of my tutors at Bristol would be long since retired or passed on.  The admissions people were helpful and amused and said it was okay, I just needed a solid client reference or two. 

Pim has the advantage of being a doctor and a company director, so that makes him a doubly handy referee.  He argued a bit and said I already know plenty and don't need to spend a lot of time and effort learning more unless it's for fun.  So I assured him it will be fun (??) and he said okay, he would provide a reference.

Then I rang up the University of Bristol for copies of my paperwork.  They arrived the next day - very fast indeed.

Now I "just" have to write the research proposal.   The admissions lady said some people write 100 pages!!  I was thinking more in terms of 2-3 pages.  After all, when I outlined the idea to my contact person in the psychology department I took 10 minutes at most and he said it was thorough and elegant.

I really have no idea how much I am proposing to take on here in terms of scope and time.  However, it doesn't really matter because 1) I'm a volunteer - what I do or don't do is up to me, 2) whether or not I complete it, I will learn an awful lot of useful stuff along the way, 3) it will build up my knowledge in things that interest me personally and professionally and 4) I am confident that I can shape things creatively as I go.

Encouragement, of a sort

A long and interest call yesterday with my brilliant friend Bruce Clark, a senior journalist at The Economist and man of prodigious intelligence.

I mentioned my PhD plans to him and after a little discussion, he said that he tended to be wary of people in their late middle age deciding to do a PhD.  He gave me an example of one project he felt sure was doomed to flounder, and then with his customary courtesy he assured me that he thought mine was a different type of PhD project.  I certainly think it is, because it's practical, research-based and pretty concrete.

Talking with my piano teacher Sophie Yates about it today, her first response was a wholehearted "that's very interesting".

For me at this point the issues are less about whether the project is of any practical value and application - it certainly would be - but rather about how much I can muster and master the necessary knowledge to pull it all together coherently.

Me? Do a PhD?

All being well my wife will graduate from med school in July and start working as an F1 (junior house officer) in August.  It's taken four years on the course and a year of preparation to reach this point - five years in all.

During all that time, I've been the sole breadwinner and holding the fort at home, with the help of au pairs. With the prospect of less pressure to earn, I've been wondering what the possibilities might be in future.

Way, way back around the same time as I applied to join Reuters Graduate Trainee Scheme, I was also investigating becoming a psychotherapist. In the course of my investigations I met some very interesting people but came to the conclusion that virtually all of them had just become more adept at talking about and justifying their neuroses. So when Reuters offered me a job, that's the route I took. Since then I have met some far more "together" people in the psych areas - Bionergetic Therapists, NLP trainers wth a broad psychology background (not weekend diploma merchants), and research neurologists.

Back to this year. I had already decided to write a book this year on the subject of Richer Conversation - likely to be in Q3 and Q4.  I expect to be thinking and learning a lot. Some of it will be original, meaning it will be based on my experience and reflections. Some of it will be adapted from academic research, philosophy etc. Assuming I would complete the book and have some momentum, I realised around mid-May that could extend the work towards a PhD.

A bounced the PhD idea around with a few people and actually got in touch with a contact at the University of Bath, Dr Neil Hinvest.  I had what I thought was a rough idea of a research project I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it, so I discussed it with him.  Pretty early on in our chat he said he would be interested in supervising the project! He summed it up as elegant, well thought-through and with many potential uses both clinically and in business.


I found it both exciting and shocking that I could go from the germ of an idea to having the idea practically accepted in such a short time.  I still have to make the application.  I still have to discuss the whole thing with my wife, once she has her finals behind her.  So it's still early days and I may still decide against it.  Whether or not, it's all very exciting.