Who runs the show

print(‘Hello, world!’)

No, wait, let me try that again.

Hi! This is an introductory post. A (very) late one, considering this website has been up and running for quite a while, but everything in its own time, right?

“Why now?”, you might wonder. In which case I invite you to check out the sections “Blaugust” and “Growth”. “Get to the point already!”, you might think, and to you I recommend to scroll down to the “Who, who, who” section.

Blaugust

This is a yearly blogging event where participants challenge themselves to write one blog post for each day of August (with one of those posts being traditionally an introduction, hence this majestic beast). The event was originally started by Belghast and is being run this year by Nerd Girl Thoughts. For the current edition, there are 125 participants and you can find them all here.

In all honesty, we know that we won’t be able to publish 31 articles in one month, but in the words of its creator: “Blaugust at its heart has always been about celebrating the creation of content on a regular schedule”. For us, there are a couple more reasons why we decided to join and they might just give you an answer to what I can only imagine runs through your mind right about now: “Huh? How is any of this related to neuroscience or introductions?”

Grappling with the definition

If you’ve been here before, you might’ve noticed that I really love good definitions. But over the past five years, I’ve struggled to define this space. Is it a blog? Is it a website? Is it a black void I occasionally scream into? Are those really that different from each other? And lurking behind, the more revealing question: why am I hesitating so much in naming it anything?

While not the only reason, this lack of clarity prevented me from ever writing a proper introduction, instead resorting to easily forgotten social media blurbs and cheeky “About Us” pages. Wanting to “sit with the cool kids” in Blaugust finally gave me the kick I needed to get to the bottom of this issue.

I did initially call it a blog. I was so settled on that, I even put it in the name (though, let’s be honest, the domain price might or might have not played some role). Now, as the next paragraph unfolds, I will basically dismantle my own belief and cast it into a rather silly light. But hey, challenging beliefs and changing them in response to new evidence is a key part of the scientific process, so yay?

Through certain interactions, I internalized the idea that the word “blog” comes with some negative connotations, especially in the science space. It didn’t take much to plant the seed of doubt. “A blog? That’s for talking about your breakfast. It’s not a serious endeavor (and doesn’t fit into what science should be).” Except…the evidence points to the contrary? Some of the coolest science communication efforts I follow online are blogs. There’s Eiko Fried’s blog about psychology and mental health research; The Niche, a blog about stem cell and regenerative medicine; the Retraction Watch blog, which tracks scientific retractions; and a lot of others (for some non-exhaustive lists, check out either Rogue Scholar or the NeuroFedora project).

And there’s another aspect to it: with the rise of AI, the word “blog” (in particular applied to science- and health-adjacent spaces) has begun to carry yet another stigma, namely that of inaccurate, soulless dredge written for the sole purpose of making money. Then again, if we stopped using words just because they’re part of “get-rich-quick” schemes, we’d soon run out of them.

Of course, a simple way around would be to call it a website. I have used the term on occasion, but I’ve always found it too formal. It’s true that we write properly sourced articles and we harbor some maybe foolish hope that one day, this place will become a pillar of multilingual neuroscientific communication. But I also like to insert funny quips wherever possible and I enjoy the freedom of chasing ideas as they come (usually in batches of 20 per day, all demanding to be pursued at once). A blog sounds like a space where that’s allowed. A website comes with a certain stiffness that I’m not quite ready for.

A reminder of an age past

Coming back to Blaugust now… Beyond motivating me to put a label on this, it’s helped me remember a time when knowledge used to be shared for the joy of it. I know, it’s quite a bit of symbolism to attach to it (and the “good old days” are seldom that good or, in this case, that old), but Blaugust does remind me of the old internet.

I know that it never fully went away, but with the rise of social media, it became increasingly difficult to find my way to that corner of the web. I’ve pined for it before, maybe due to nostalgia, maybe due to selective memory (after all, I was still a child when it was in full swing), but I remember the joy of stumbling onto someone’s 10.000-word dissection of a topic I’d never thought about. That kind of curiosity-driven space is harder to find now, and Blaugust seems like a chance to bring it back.

Growth

Now that we’re (hopefully) clear on why Blaugust motivated us to write this introduction, we can move to the second ~~culprit~~ contributor: growth. I’ll keep this one short: over the years, this blog stopped being read just by my mom and dad (hi, Mom! hi, Dad!) and a handful of people I sort of knew. At some point, complete strangers began stumbling upon it. And some of them, quite reasonably, had questions: who the heck is writing this? Why should I trust them? What’s their deal? Fair questions. Especially when you’re trying to learn about science on the internet. Remember: just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true.

Who, who, who

Now, putting my name on the Internet is still a little scary. I’m not fully comfortable with it, so for today I’ll stick to Cristiana (although online I prefer NeuroNerd). For what it’s worth, I have a PhD in computational neuroscience.

But you shouldn’t blindly trust me. Yes, I’ve had formal training in neuroscience. Yes, I’m an expert in some of the things I write about. I’ve been reading and interpreting scientific literature for fun (and for work) for some years, and I cite my sources. That said, I am not the holder of absolute truth. Should you trust what I write more than what a marketing specialist says about sleep? Yes. Should you trust a marketing specialist more than me when it comes to Google Ads? Also yes. (If I ever give a strong opinion on that, I’m definitely pulling it out of the proverbial behind. Make of that what you will.)

The main purpose of this blog is to provide accurate neuroscientific information to as many people as possible because it seems to me there’s a lack of it, especially in non-English languages. The secondary purpose is for me to have a dedicated space for some of my ideas, so I don’t annoy my friends and family with them (and then annoy them anyway). The articles here are free, and they’ll stay that way for as long as I’m able to keep writing them. Yes, there are donation buttons and you might see an ad now and then. No, I’m not trying to get rich off this. It just costs money to run a website. It also costs time, which I could spend doing things that pay my bills. It would also be cool if at some point I could pay people to help out, instead of relying on good will and good vibes. But that’s not really the point. I just wanted to get this out of the way, because sometimes it’s a sensitive issue.

I also tend to alternate between “I” and “we.” Partly because saying “I” all the time feels weird. Partly because it does take a village, even if, right now, the village is quite small.

I’m the one writing the articles (though we’ve had a couple of excellent guest posts over the years). The lovely illustrations are by Ionut Stefan, an awesome UK-based graphic designer with endless patience for my “make everything brain” shenanigans. That’s all he wanted to share here, but you can see more of his work or get in touch via his own website: ionutstefan.ro.

And now, with our recently launched translation project, articles are being translated by a host of wonderful people who’ve taken a chance in reaching out to a random internet stranger and donated their time and skills towards making this a more inclusive space. I don’t have enough words to express my gratitude towards them and at the same time, I hope more volunteers will join the project.

The workflow

This post is already quite long, but there was another aspect that caught my eye in the intro prompt for Blaugust, and I know that if I don’t get to it now, it will never happen. That aspect was discussing the blogging/creative workflow and it drew my attention because it echoed the “how do you do it” essence of several questions I’ve received over the years, from “how did you learn math” to “how did you do a PhD”.

Perhaps it’s a simple question, but it’s always stumped me, as my first instinct is “I don’t know, I just sat down and did it.” Not the most eloquent or insightful answer. So I’ll try to give more of a description here for how I handle article writing.

Coming up with ideas

It probably sounds stupid, but I don’t think I actively come up with ideas. It’s more that ideas come up to me. I do spend a lot of time online, which means I read a lot of science-related content, partly from journals themselves, mostly shared by scientists on social media or disseminated through science-focused publications. I also connect a lot of what I read with what people tell me or what I observe about the world. But it’s not exactly intentional, it’s just…what I do. And honestly, my biggest problem is chilling out enough to see the ideas through.

Implementing the ideas

This is even more of a mess to describe, but here we go. I usually start an article by either going over my running list of topics, or (more often) picking whatever happened to catch my attention that day.

Then I open a new Obsidian note and jot down some thoughts on the topic: something I remember from university, from my work, from an article I read somewhere, or anything that topic sparks. These are my starting assumptions, that have to be checked to see if they still hold, to be refined or filled in. After that, I begin to search for information, both in scientific databases (my current go-to is Europe PMC) and through a general search engine. This is where things get truly messy. I’ll look up to see if there are review articles on the topic, if there’s new research, if it’s been covered anywhere in the press, and if there is any discussion about this on forums (Reddit and HackerNews are great places to start).

From here, my mind transforms into a giant cluster of entangled threads, going back and forth between multiple sources of information, sometimes reading a publication from start to finish, other times skimming and jumping to other ones, jotting down both facts and thoughts, until a rough first outline materializes into existence.

Finally, I polish it by reading it a couple of times, trimming the fat and expanding upon whatever seems unclear. And when I’ve reached the point of pure hatred and disappointment towards the piece, that’s when I know this whirlwind is at the end and I can translate and publish. If I feel particularly insecure about a piece, I’ll usually ask my partner to read it before throwing it out in front of the world.

So anyway…I have no idea who finds this helpful, but that’s what I mean by “sit down and do the thing”. That isn’t to say that I can’t make a structured plan and stick to it when needed, just that this approach is more fun and this blog is all about joy (and neuroscience, but mainly joy).

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