State of consciousness

Two meetings have recently made me think about two states of consciousness in science: Reflection and flow.

Ragnar Söderberg foundation recently organized a get together event for the first eight Ragnar Söderberg fellows in Medicine. Thank you for a great and inspiring day! Professor Gunnar von Heijne at Stockholm University was invited to talk about career pathways and gave us thoughtful advice. He said a great thing:

“Don’t be annoyed if you go to a boring lecture. Use it as quality time and reflection – no one will bother you!”

At the recent 20 year anniversary of Department of Microbiology Tumor and Cell biology at Karolinska Institutet, Professor George Klein hold the closing remarks. Professor Klein reminded us about the state of flow.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

During the last months of my 5 year-long postdoc in Boston I experienced flow. It was a fantastic time. After the very long struggle to generate new experimental models I could finally start to examine them. All of a sudden, everything I touched in the lab worked. I just performed more and more experiments. I am not exaggerating when I say that all figures for 2 papers were made during these amazing four months. I didn’t want to stop since I didn’t want to lose the flow. A French postdoc and dear friend in the neighboring lab came to get me late in the afternoon to make sure I ate something during the day (I was pregnant with my daughter Linn during this period). 

How can we achieve flow? If I had the answer I would be more than happy to share it. I just don’t know. What I do know is that once you achieve it – drop everything else and make beautiful science!

And flow is like happiness – we can not have it all the time, then we wouldn’t appreciate it.

Lisa Westerberg

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