Welcome to “The Lab”
I’ve done a lot of thinking recently about what has/ has not worked for PSSD research.
- First of all, in science, nothing is done alone. People work together.
- Second, I don’t have the time to solve PSSD alone (unless I get lucky, or for a long time). I’ve worked hard to research, but my time is limited.
- Third, if no one holds me accountable for continuing to push forwards, it’s easy to shove PSSD research to the back burner.
Finally, there is so much knowledge that we could use, and we need people to compile it. We need a PSSD manual.
Where am I going with this?
People have asked me how they can help me do research. My best answer would be that we need to work together. Scientists rarely work alone, and a lab is a bustling place with a lot of people throwing around ideas. I have this fear that our efforts aren’t organized enough.
Obviously we can’t do everything that a normal lab does, but I think creating a small community of those interested in PSSD research would really help. We need more self-written papers and theories.
I’ve taken a step back from pushing forwards, and am working on a presentation video that should give everyone an overview of neuroscience and PSSD theory in under 30 minutes: the time of one lecture. That would be the starting point of the lab.
How you can help:
The following are areas that I see as holes in the PSSD effort. I am looking for motivated people who are interested in collaborating to make the effort to eliminate PSSD a success.
- Something that takes an overview of all of our knowledge and lays it out so people from the street can understand it. (This objective is in progress, and a list of PSSD Resources has been started).
- I also have all the data that I collected from people over the summer of 2016. I’d obviously keep data anonymous, but I’m looking for someone who is good with math that could help me do statistics on it. Additionally, is there anyone interested in taking this data and turning it into a paper?
- Does anyone have a list of chemicals/ drugs that they are interested in? Would they want to write a paper explaining how they could help PSSD? (This objective is also in progress, with pages on What We’ve Tried, and Possible Treatments being started).
- Creation of a research lab, as described below:
It may work like this: people who want to do research collaborate once a week or so, and we bounce ideas off over each other’s stuff. It’d be pretty loosely organized, but I could spend a lot of time catching people up to what I’ve already done, and helping people figure out how to research. In the collaboration (which could even be over PM or email), we’d toss ideas back and forth, help the others in “The Lab” with feedback on their ideas. We could edit their papers, or give counterarguments. People could work on projects alone, or we could work in small groups on projects/papers.
Is there any interest in this? I think it would be about 3-4 hours of work per week. People could come and go as they pleased, but it would be nice to have commitment from people if they do decide to be in “The Lab” at a given time.