A Longer Introduction

Hello! Welcome to gabRie, my blog for exploring all things related to data! I have created an about page which includes a short biography and various places you can find me across the internet.

Since this is my first professional blog post ever, I’ll go ahead and restate some of things in my about page with a few fun extra details.

As of writing this, I’m a PhD candidate in neuroscience! My specialty is in a subdomain of neuroscience referred to as systems neuroscience, or depending on who you ask, behavioral neuroscience. The common thread between both systems and behavioral neuroscience is a fascination with figuring out how neural circuits make behavior happen. Yet another term for that domain of interest is neuroethology- the formal study of how neural systems create behavior. While there’s a lot of back and forth about what we should call ourselves, I consider myself a neuroscientist who identifies with all of those titles.

I’ve been a lifelong lover of all things behavior- with my earliest interactions with the study of behavior starting with my childhood obsession with animals. I was that kid that checked out every single science book in the library geared towards children who can point to a housecat and tell you exactly what breed of cat it likely descends from. I found it so fascinating that despite all living things being made of up of the same genetic material, every living creature is somehow so distinct from one another. Some cats are nice, some are naughty, some are talkative, some are lazy, and some only enjoy wet food if it’s in pate form, but nonetheless, they are all still cats that have mostly the same genetic makeup. What makes them different, besides the wide variety of fur coat colors, is how cats behave on a day-to-day to basis, which is ultimately a result of living lives in which they come across various different experiences with other living things or other environmental stimuli.

As I got older, I realized people aren’t any different. People all come from the same genetic “stuff”, and yet no two people are alike or respond to events in their lives in the same way. It was this fascination that led me to begin studying psychology in college. I took many, many courses relating to behavior and the parts of the brain that underlie it, which was not at all surprising to me. What was surprising to me, however, was the fact that all psychological research actually heavily depends on statistics. I will be completely honest, I was never the best math student. While I always made good grades, I typically struggled to earn anything higher than a “B” in my math courses. Despite being intimidated, I was determined to become a brain scientist of some sort, so I bravely faced my first statistics course ever, and to my complete surprise, I fell in love with it.

I think a lot of my early fascination with statistics had to do with the fact that I could use it uncover the secrets of human behavior. I still greatly love statistics and data analysis for this reason. You really can learn so much about what makes people the way they are by looking at the data they produce while scrolling the internet, completing a puzzle, or taking a math test - but at the same time, you really still don’t know anything about them. Statistics is aware of that uncertainty and can try to account for it in a way I find very satisfying.