By some miracle, in our residency program we are given a four week block of research time. I’ve just started. Here’s my plan.
Read. I plan to explore, without a concrete set of papers or topics to begin with. My hope here is to follow my nose and perhaps start to build the groundwork for future research. I see this as a chance to step back from my clinical experience and past research areas, and dip my toes into the broader pool of work in psychiatry, neuroscience and other disciplines. Minimally, I plan to read through abstracts of the proceedings of some well-regarded psychiatry journals to survey the state of play over the last year. I have also been working my way through the book, Explaining The Brain by Craver.
Study. I don’t have a neuroscience background, and what I do know is mostly through osmosis and patchy assemblies of knowledge I’ve picked up during my time in neuroimaging research or medical school. I find making sense of the literature can be daunting because of this ignorance alone. For that reason, I’ve started a program of educating myself on the basics of neuroscience. I am starting with functional neuroanatomy via the lovely The Human Brain, by John Nolte. After that, very likely a biostatistics (re)fresher.
Do. There a few projects I have on the go, some of which could be developed into research projects. I plan to put some energy into those when I get sick of reading.
