My Mentor and How I Fell in Love with Neuroscience (My Serotonin Tattoo)

Arne Dietrich was my Neuroscience professor at the American University of Beirut. However, to me, Arne was so much more than that. I doubt he knows the profound impact he had on me, but I am the person I am today because I studied under him at just the right time in my life.

I used to be angry, conservative and intolerant. I wore a giant gold, gem-encrusted cross. I hated gay people. I thought life was just a test for an afterlife. I was stupid, petty and unimpressed. The world never made sense. I was never really happy.

I was in a Catholic school, so instead of being taught Natural Selection, we were taught Darwin is a demon and ignored the parts in the official curriculum that had to do with Evolution. My parents paid a shit-load of money for years, I had to jump through hoops and got accepted into a top university, but I hadn’t even learned the first thing about Natural Selection.

Love Affair with Biology and Psychology

Luckily, AUB changed that, and I fell in love with everything alive and life itself. Nature was the most fascinating thing to me, and life was its crown jewel. Organisms that eat, fuck and try to survive. An arrangement of cells and molecules that could feel, think, hope, love, hate and all those things we never think of in a scientific, mechanistic way. That was fucking awesome to study.

I had to take a social science elective, and a friend’s older sister taught an intro to Psychology course. Pre-med me thought, “nice, easy 90!” and I signed up for it. I, like many, thought Psychology as the Freudian bullcrap we see in pop culture. When I took the intro course at 17, I discovered Neuroscience, and to me, Psychology seemed like a beautiful extension of Biology. There’s only so much you can tell from the molecular level, and that’s where circuits and networks come in and create who we really are, our beautiful brains. I fell in love, and the next semester, I signed up to Arne’s “Behavioral Neuroscience” course, then took “Cognitive Neuroscience” with him and even History and Systems.

I was teetering on the edge of belief, and lack of it. I felt guilty for losing faith after discovering how wonderful nature is, and how there is no need for a creator. The elegance of it all, though tough to swallow at first, made life make sense. It made people’s behavior make sense. It was all so elegant and imperfect and beautiful. I was on a ledge when I started, but I was on the far side of that valley by the end of it, and I loved it.

That’s when I became a happy person. I felt the good things more deeply, and focused less on the bad ones. I was less angry, less hateful and extremely tolerant and understanding. If I met pre-Biology me, I’d probably slap the shit out of him.

The serotonin tattoo on my wrist was the moment when I finally was convinced with who I am and how I see the world and myself in it. And even though it definitely wasn’t Arne’s doing, I was lucky enough to study under him when I needed it the most, and for that I will be forever grateful.

New Age People, Watch This

With the rise of the yogi and vegan trend, a lot of people feel enlightened and become anti-science, believing fodder and pseudoscience and “metaphysics” and other stuff that I feel is counterproductive to our progress and awareness as a self-reflecting species. My personal belief is that these people took too much LSD or mushrooms, and feel “enlightened” and bombard us with conspiracy theories and testimonials that are just as annoying as the religious kind. The preachy, evidence-less, anecdotal, feel-good, self-help, new age stuff that replaced the boring, rigid religious beliefs of yesteryear. But reality and nature is so much more fascinating, and understanding is so much more fulfilling…

So, this TEDx is for you. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, and focus for a few minutes. Follow Arne’s line of thought, and go in with an open mind. I promise it will make you think, and appreciate a lot of things you never even considered. It also is a nice slap in the face back to the reality many of us ignore and never really embrace. So, I help this can help you snap back to reality and understand consciousness and its altered states better, and in that, yourself and your brain better. It really helped me at one point, and I really hope it helps some of you too.

And if you like it, and I’m sure you will, Arne’s published a new book: “How Creativity Happens in the Brain” which you can buy here.