Neuroscientist Qi Lin struggles to connect with friends and colleagues when she can’t escape her scientific mindset.

Hailing from Guangzhou (with the best dim sum!), China, Qi Lin is currently working in Dr. Daniela Schiller's lab as a lab manager and investigate the flexibility of emotional memory and the neural basis of social cognition. Qi graduated from New York University with a bachelor degree in psychology in 2015 December. She has a picture of her brain (sagittal) attached on her refrigerator door.

This story originally aired on March 31, 2017.

Story Transcript

I’m the kind of person who tries to avoid any sort of conflict in all occasions, as you can tell from my smile.

But then three years ago, in one of my philosophy classes, I infuriated a room full of my classmates and totally out of my expectation. In that class, we were discussing Kafka’s Metamorphosis and self-identity - a very exciting topic.

My classmates were all very, very excited about it, and they just went back and forth, back and forth for almost half an hour about why a beetle and a human can have the same self-identity, and why do family members just accept this fact.

Sitting there, looking at all this intense debate, I was thinking, Hmm, this discussion is not leading to any fruitful answer. Maybe I should say something to help move this forward.

So as an aspiring neuroscientist, I raise my hand and I say, “All aspects of these human experiences can be explained by clusters of neurons and their activities in the brain, and I think this is a question that can be answered by science.”

Saying this, I think my classmates will understand that lets move on to the topic, science will give us the answer. To my surprise, they were all really offended. It almost sounded to me that the word ‘brain’ should be a taboo in such a discussion. One of them even questioned by denying the existence of the soul.

Well, I’m not saying there’s no soul but I do think you need a brain to have a soul. But of course, I didn’t say this out loud. As I said, I try to avoid any sort of conflict and I don’t want this to become an even more heated debate.

For the remaining of that class, I just remained silent and there probably was a mysterious smirk on my face and I’m thinking, Hmm,” say to my friends, “I’m going to study the brain and tell you where self-identity leads.”

Yes, so that was me three years ago. I just got introduced to the field of neuroscience and was super excited about this idea that human experiences can be explained by looking at neural processes happening in the brain.

I was like this kid who’d just got this new pair of glasses and all of a sudden, the whole world just looked different to me. I was so excited about this that I would apply this to everything in my life and I mean everything.

One Saturday, a very good friend of mine called me and tells me that she needs someone to talk to. She just broke up with her boyfriend and they’ve been together for a long time. She loved him very much and she tells me that she is having these dreams of fights with her ex-boyfriend. She would wake up in the middle of the night crying and sweating, and this has been really disturbing to her and she doesn’t know how to move on.

After listening to her, I go, “You know what, I’ve been reading about memory replay during sleep recently. It’s basically this idea that brain cells that fire at the time of memory formation, they fire again in the same sequence during sleep. This is thought to be the processes underlying why memory can be stored across such a long timescale. I think what happened to you could be because your fights with your ex-boyfriend were so painful to you, and caused you a lot of distress at the time. Your brain just thinks this must be very critical to your survival so they just got replaying more during your sleep. It’s your brain.”

As you can imagine, that conversation didn’t end up too well.

Anyway, fast forward. Last summer I had a crush on a guy living on the same floor as me. In the very first email I wrote to him, I wrote, “Have you heard of misattribution error? We attribute reasons for our physical arousal such as sweating or accelerating heart rate to reasons that we think cause this arousal. Scientists have found that people can mistakenly attribute this physical arousal to wrong reasons. I think that could be what happened to me,” Yes, and then I just go on to talk about the mere-exposure effect.

“Basically, I mean, I think I like you but I don’t think it’s because of you. I think it’s because the weather was really nice when we first met and then we just saw each other too often afterwards. Then we wait for the elevator every day and we see each other - that makes sense,”

And yes, I think this is how you impress a guy. It worked. Okay, he did ask me to help him with his brother’s college application essay afterwards.

Anyway, let’s not talk about it today. Let’s talk about something that’s more interesting - what I do in the lab.

I study emotion and memory, in particular, how emotional memory can be changed. As an undergraduate research assistant, a major part of my responsibility is to recruit study participants via an email.

At times, we would get these emails from people with psychological problems, but I usually don’t even open this kind of email because first, I don’t know enough to answer their questions and second, it’s not directly related to what I’m doing.

But one day, as I’m scrolling through the mailbox, an email titled ‘Possibility of erasing unwanted memory?’ caught my eye. This is a very typical help-seeking email that I would usually have ignored but this one, it’s a little bit special because the sender’s name is in Chinese characters, so out of curiosity I click on it.

It’s from this man in China. His wife confessed to him several months ago that she is having an affair with someone they both knew. After a long and painful discussion, they decided that they still love each other and would like to stay together but since that, this man, he just couldn’t get the fact that his wife and this other man being together out of his mind, and this has been really disturbing to him.

He tried to seek help from psychiatric professionals but nothing worked out for him. He’s very desperate for a way out.

As he is looking for treatments online by himself, he stumbled upon a paper published by my supervisor several years ago about disrupting emotional memory using electroconvulsive therapy. He is so desperate for a way out that he decided that he will email us.

What shocked me most about his email is not just its length and the emotional intensity, but also his language. There’s no grammar at all and the tenses were all wrong and he used extremely weird words that no one really uses.

As someone who also learned English as a second language, I think I know how he wrote that email. He probably had the email in an online Chinese-English dictionary open in two separate browsers.

Then he would write his email in Chinese first and then translate them word by word using that Chinese-English dictionary.

Sitting there, I just couldn’t help but imagine how helpless and desperate one has to be in order to spend all this effort to write such a long email in a foreign language, and send it to a group of researchers thousands of miles away who may not even reply to him if he sent it to someone like me.

At that moment, I do want to reply to him but then I realized I don’t know how to. Based on what I know, it’s not yet possible to safely erase memory without causing severe side effects.

But if I tell him so, I will just crush his last hope, so I wait and my supervisor comes in. I show him this email and he tells me that we’ve got a lot of emails like this and what we do in the lab, actually travel beyond the ivory tower that I’ve been trapping myself in and may bring hope to other people.

That day I just realized there’s a very difficult part of being a scientist and doing science, that is how we explain what we know, or what we don’t know yet, about human beings in a way that is scientifically cracked but to bring people hope.

I think I’m still not very good at it because a lot of my friends would stop calling me about their problems. But I promise I will work on it.