James Danckert
In my early undergraduate years I dreamed of being an author of fiction. The 180 degree shift from that to cognitive neuroscience was not so much a long road, but a winding one. In my first year of university, my brother crashed his car and suffered serious brain trauma. In my second year, I was fed the story all undergrads love of Phineas Gage and his iron rod. The connections to my brother’s struggles to regain control of his life were obvious. I was hooked. I wanted to know more about the most complex of human capacities — executive functions. It helped that one of my brother’s chief complaints after his injury was that he was bored — something I too suffered from without the help of a car crash.
My first foray into research, guided by the ever humorous and insightful Paul Maruff, focused not on executive control but on visual attention (I think of the Posner task as a kind of cognitive science mafia — I’ve tried to stop using it, but it keeps dragging me back in). That eventually led to spatial neglect, dorsal this, ventral that (under the superb guidance of Mel Goodale), a foray into prisms (thanks to the huge generosity of Yves Rossetti) and a job at the University of Waterloo.
My brother crashed his car in 1991. My job started in 2002. I published my first paper on boredom in 2005. I received my first external funding to really start researching boredom properly in 2012. So maybe it has been a long road.
And of course, research is not (surprisingly to some) all there is to life. I met my Canadian wife in 2000, we married in 2001 and we have two boys who I have often referred to as “my beautiful frustrations.” I still harbor dreams of writing fiction, but do little about them! I do write my own songs and play them to my audience of one — she says they’re great and that’s enough for me. And I chase down boredom. I no longer think I can outrun it. I don’t even want to try. But I do think we understand it far better now than my naïve 19-year-old brain did way back when Nirvana first sang about the powerful whiff of teen spirit!