From: The Possibilian by Burkhard Bilger
Mathematicians, like rock musicians, tend to do their best work in their twenties and thirties. Not so neuroscientists.
The Nobel Prizes in the field are usually earned in mid-career, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks.
“Biology is special that way,” Eagleman says. “It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works.
Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.”
