• Question: have you ever made a discovery that has helped your fellow scientists?

    Asked by anon-188360 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 12 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 12 Nov 2018: last edited 13 Nov 2018 12:13 am

      Hi Pixie, thanks for the question. I am still relatively junior in my career so I have not helped out other scientists as much as I would like yet in terms of discoveries. However, in the past I have helped out on a lot of projects run in our sleep lab. Sleep studies take a lot of effort to run, partly because researchers can get burnt out easily as (ironically) it can make you very sleep deprived! As such, our lab group tends to muck in when one runs. The same goes for ‘scoring’ our sleep record data (working out the sleep stages) as this needs to be done separately by at least two individuals (so we can compare to see how much we agree). In this sense I have helped quite a few people run their projects.

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Hi Pixie,

      Thanks for this important question. I work on understanding how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information in the world differs between traditional research (that typically uses just visual or just auditory etc. objects) and how information is typically presented in the real world – across multiple senses at once (“multisensory information”).
      From my experience, both with specialists who care about these functions in the real world – head teachers, teachers and educators, as well as doctors treating different disorders of the brain but also scientists – do recognise the fact that the existing research may be limited in what it can tell us about “real world” attention and memory. So I think despite my young age I am doing research that is providing more direct evidence for what scientists and other have been thinking about learning intuitively for quite some time. 🙂

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Thanks so much for the question!
      I keep thinking discovery questions are so touch because discovery implies finding out something people didn’t know before and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to be THAT epic. I guess I’m more highlighting the problems we know exist but don’t get enough attention and then coming up with ways to fix them?
      So I my closest answer would be that I’ve managed to highlight how much culture and language effects how we perform on tests that diagnose dementia and how likely we are to get help for it. It can completely change your diagnosis and effect whether you get cared for, receive medicine or therapy and have support. I talk about it, write about- try to get the word out there. And then to fix this I came up with a method that others can use to adapt tests for culture and language so everyone can get diagnosed equally. And now I’m trying to make a toolkit that can be used to give all people the help they need, no matter what their background is!
      Hope that answers it!

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