log : ngl

From the perspective of neuroscience, meditation can be characterized as a series of mental exercises by which one strengthens one’s control over the workings of their own brain. The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention. A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human. As such, sustained gamma activity has emerged as a proxy for at least some aspects of the meditative state.

“Meditation on Demand” – Scientific American

I’m a Star Trek nerd. I remember taping every single episode of The Next Generation. I remember having to wait all summer to watch the second part of Best of Both Worlds, and it killed me, because how could they do that to the fans and make them wait after Riker gave the order to fire on the Borg ship? I remember standing outside our kitchen door with the piece of PBC pipe we used to turn the arial on our roof so we could get a slightly better reception. I loved every minute of it, because when that signal came through nice and clear (or clear enough), it was pure happiness.

Flash forward to today. I received a trouble ticket for a new printer for one of the offices downstairs. That’s all the ticket said, just “(room number) needs a new laserjet printer”. Well, why? I went down there to talk with the person at the front desk and learned that the printer will work fine most of the time, but when she needs to print labels, it will jam. Not only that, but it will jam only after a couple of sheets. While I was trouble-shooting, we got into a conversation about how specialization in IT can be both a good and a bad thing, how it’s hard to find IT jobs in the area, and how the field of IT itself can mean so many different things. I boiled it down to “for my specific kind of IT specialization, you need to be able to think on your feet. Most of the time, there is no one way to solve a problem, you just need to know which questions to ask.”

I fixed her problem with a piece of scotch tape, thereby saving my employer roughly $200.

Whenever I watched Star Trek, I never identified with the explorer, the scientist, the captain, or the tactical officer. I’m not much of an adventurer, I don’t like politics, and I don’t have the head to decipher ancient civilizations. The character I always, without fail I identified with was the engineer. Montegomery Scott, Geordi LaForge, Miles O’Brien, B’Elanna Torres, and Trip Tucker (I almost forgot. As of this Friday, Simon Pegg will join these ranks). These were the characters who had a job, their tools, and the primal need to make things work. Their action figures didn’t come with phasers, but with wrenches. O’Brien was my favorite. While all the other engineers travelled the galaxy, O’Brien was stuck on a space station. He had obsolete technology that never worked, so most of it had to be jury-rigged. He didn’t have the luxury of replacing everything that was broken, he had to find inventive ways of making things work again.

I realized recently that most of the reason why I work in IT is because of the chief engineer characters in Star Trek. They were the glue that held the ship or station together. While others were exploring, the engineers enabled the exploring to happen. They were jacks of all trades, masters of all. When their commanding officer gave them a problem, they never said “It can’t be done!” (well, except for Scotty), they paused, the wheels turned, and they found a way to do it. They made things happen, never in the best of circumstances, and frequently right in the nick of time. They had their hands dirty, always under a console or inside an engine, making things happen. Those are the people I looked up to when I was a kid, and without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.