A tale of two brains

Photo by Robina Weermeijer, sourced from Unsplash

"Computer programming? Really?" My family and friends were nearly as surprised as I was. I began college undecided with an interest in psychology...and graduated a short six years later with a computer science degree and at least 30 accidental credits.

Growing up I was told I was a certain type, a ‘right-brain’ type for whom reading and writing came naturally, while mathematics and science came only with a struggle. And it was easy for me to believe – after all, who would want to trade a novel for a calculus textbook? Algebra was boring. A math-focused and algorithmically intensive curriculum did not appear to be in my future. But, as time went on the lines dividing my hemispheres and interests grew fuzzier.

I remember the nights my dad would browse through our encyclopedias in the living room and read out entries at random. The information in encyclopedias is biased only by alphabetical ordering - in our set, every letter had a volume (Z was a relatively quick read). A prefix like ‘neut’ might result in back-to-back articles from the fields of physics (neutron), biology (neutrality theory), history (neutrality act), and astronomy (neutron star). No authors were listed; it was easy to imagine a lone renaissance writer compiling human knowledge for its own sake, no matter how applicable that knowledge might be in the moment.

My friend's mother had a clock with a different bird for every hour. At the top of each hour, the clock played the bird's unique song. She had a cassette of nature sounds for car rides to train her ears as she identified the bird species in the recordings. She would point out birds on walks and share facts about their rarity or migratory patterns. She liked birds. Not because she was an ornithologist or a competitive bird watcher or a hunter or an environmentalist. It was simple curiosity.

When I was 11 or 12 I found a praying mantis in our yard. Something about the way it cocked its head in my direction made me feel I had permission to keep it. I got a small glass bottle, a coffee filter, and a rubber band, and voila - a far more interesting pet than the cat; although if you asked me to describe a mantis now, I would say they are just like cats, except with razor blades on their arms.

I quickly discovered I had no idea how to take care of a mantis and it died within a few days. But my curiosity was piqued and I turned to the internet to see if I was alone. Enter https://mantidforum.net/, an online forum dedicated to the raising and breeding of exotic mantid species. With the help of some devoted hobbyists and birthday money, along with concerned looks from my parents, a shipment of Rhombodera Basalis (Giant Shield Mantis) was on its way.

I soon found it necessary to adopt a slew of unrelated food sources to accommodate the life stages and relative sizes of the praying mantis. Eventually, I shared my tiny room with mealworms, blue bottle flies, crickets, and cockroaches. I raised my first mantids to adulthood and began to raise several species at once, to attempt breeding (a risky endeavor if you know the mantis mating rituals), and to share my success online with my fellow hobbyists.

By the time I started college I had given up mantis rearing, though it provided excellent conversation-starting material. "I didn't know people did that. Why?" I had no idea - it didn't matter. There was a freedom in knowing it was okay to pursue whatever I was interested in, regardless of who else was. Call it impractical curiosity. At the same time, I felt an immense pressure to find something practical to do with my life.

I wanted to do something that would help people in a way I could relate to. Psychology seemed the most direct way to do that, but I was quickly disenchanted with my first course. The idea of publishing experiments that might make an impact sometime far in the future didn't interest me. And the amount of schooling required for clinical psychology was enough on its own to convince me to look elsewhere.

I took my first computer science course not long after and with some trepidation. My imagination was full of negative programmer stereotypes - basement-dwelling, anti-social, overweight, condescending, etc. Personality tests I took to see what career might fit me best all pointed to counseling or teaching or writing. An old voice began hinting I wasn't cut out for this kind of work, that I should stick to my hemisphere and my strengths.

The first few weeks of the course pleasantly surprised me. While coding was difficult and often unintuitive, it required creativity - a solution could be arrived at in many ways, some better than others. In addition, it was rewarding to see the fruits of my labor as programs I could run that did useful things. My mind raced with possibilities; there were so many things to build and my time and knowledge were the only limitations. For the most part my classmates were not very different from me and I could easily picture myself working alongside them.

I now have several years of professional experience as a software developer and continue to enjoy building useful things. And I doubt I would be in this field if I hadn't been open to adopting new conceptions (and new pets). It was the love of sharing knowledge and an openness to new interests that brought me to this profession.

This site was going to be a portfolio, a place for me to display my best work, a resume hoster. As I looked at other portfolio sites for inspiration I was struck by how polished they were...and how many felt sterile, like they existed to showcase and not to share. I want this site to be more than a portfolio. I hope it will creatively share some of my interests. And maybe it will further blur the lines between the brain.