i spent some time flying not too long ago. you know, the kind of situation where you sit next to some stranger for hours on end. the kind of situation that, shortly before that, would have thrown me into total chaos and disaster.

well, on one of my connecting flights, i sat next to someone who was actually a little inclined toward conversation. i was actually for once not opposed to this connection with another member of society- i somehow managed to talk myself down from the edge to handle the situation for which i was flying in the first place, but that is another story.

back to this person sitting next to me. i told him what i did for a living, which usually garners a fair amount of interest. see, public knowledge of my field is i think sadly lacking, and unbiased texts in layman’s terms are very difficult to come by. so this guy almost instantly animated. he had so many questions. he personally struggled with a condition closely related to what i study for a living, and he was so thirsty for knowledge to understand the mechanisms. simply going through treatment for it was not enough for him, he wanted to understand it, how it happened, why it worked the way it did.

i felt so… relevant. we had a good talk about causative factors, about how we’re studying a lot of different facets of how the brain areas of interest work and dysfunction, and how we’re learning how other underlying conditions might trigger the condition we study. he told me he was glad to have run into me, and i wished him the best of luck in his journey.

this is the type of person i would love to reach more often. absolutely starving for knowledge, highly interested, even asked me for suggestions of layman’s reading material so that he could read more about the topic.

public outreach in science happens in the most average of places… i think we should all do well to remember that.