- What is original in science? Is it the established myth or the dogma that cannot be challenged due to any reason including the absence of an alternative explanation -- hence surviving by default?
- Who will decide what is original (Morris J. Lancet 342; 930, 1993)?
- Or will the significance of originality creep upon us unannounced?
- Is it the accumulated data, or, the randomized clinical trial, or, the meta-analyses or the complex statistical analyses that colour the data?
- Is it the paper that has gathered an International Award or has been read out with fanfare at the Medical Conference?
- Is it a complex or complexing nosological system based on pure symptoms or phenomenology, such as the International Headache Classification?
- What are the reflections or indicators of the promise of originality?
- Is it the applause or the standing ovation or the illusion of a tearaway mode of investigation? Genetics always creates excitement and awe / overawe.
- Is it the promise of the future or the bird-in-hand that can settle issues today?
- Is it the poster at which everyone crowds around at a Medical Conference or the poster that stands neglected?
- Is it a review paper that compels you to think hard even long after you have finished reading it or the editorial that sheds some light or no light on a dark corridor of medicine / science?
- Is it that which increases or encourages speculation, empirical-thinking and therapy, myth- and dogma-formation, further stimulates experiments in humans and animals, creating stubbornly entrenched positions from which extrication appears impossible?
- Is it the crisp presentation of data in a new format or in a newer crucible of statistics?
Vinod Kumar Gupta
- If a hypothetical paper is accepted by a reputable journal, then it is certainly not original. Between the warm bedsheets of academic cozyness and mutual understanding between the potential author and the editorial team passes a wink of acceptance, smoothly gliding the so-called-originality into the comfortable world of published research documents and into the dusty annals of history.
- The damage done to the cause of medical research is minimal and everybody seems happy at the outcome; the Ombudsman is not bothered out of her/his stupor and life carries on as if without any new ripple at all.
- Ideas in print RARELY ONLY reflect hostility, subversion, the frantic desire to surge forward, overturn the conventional understanding, deconstruct the foundation-free or -less extant skyscraper of knowledge or perceived wisdom or myth or assumption that appears so invincible that any protest or counter-logic, stand out at a different plane altogether at which level the debate has not even yet been stirred up in the minds of those that might connect with the future.
- The greatest danger posed by a suspiciously-looking futuristic possibly original paper is the threat of partial or total deconstruction and un-wrapping from a life-time or several life-times of academic belief-in-comfort.
- He who rides a tiger cannot dismount -- old Indo-Chinese saying. Dismounting the tiger of personal reputation or stake, the person risks losing what is most precious to her/him--the sense of identity.
- That is only one UNIVERSAL IDENTITY that really matters, but, at such times--when the person who has ARRIVED at the centre-stage risks a life-time of face-value or PROFESSIONAL repute amongst those who currently dwell with her/him ON THIS PLANET, getting off one's high horse can be very distressing or could even mean dissolution.
- Cortical spreading depression in rodents believed-by-belief precisely qualifies as a carefully-built up academic physiologic-principle-of-a-skyscraper that cannot be allowed to fall-by-the-side, as the consequences of its fall would be Earth- and science-of-migraine shaking.
- Big ideas can stymie medicine and medical research (Joyner, JAMA).
- There is no illness as common as migraine in the general population or even in Neurology itself with reams-upon-reams of articles already published, and, even more on the way to sustain the long, tangled and hopelessly confused chain of Gordian knots, both in series and parallel, putting Stonehenge / Sphinx-Pyramid and other human-world complexities to shame.
- And there is no idea bigger or more carefully groomed or committed to in migraine pathophysiology than CORTICAL SPREADING DEPRESSION.
- There is an immediacy, a-never-ending-sense-of-urgency to ensure that the concept of cortical spreading depression survives the bitterest onslaught from hordes of disbelievers.
- What do we do EVEN MORE to save THE CONCEPT OF CSD?
- We need to replicate, reprint the virtually same message in all possible neurological, general medical, and other open access periodicals.
- We also need to pursue cortical spreading depression in the colours of all neurological substances or neuro-peptides ,and, above-all, the NEURO-THINKING that emerges from time to time -- allodynia, neuronal plasticity, and many more fertile ideas in the quest for a perpetual stalemate.
- We need to keep a concept alive theoretically as well as politically.
- We need to keep on compulsorily talking about it at Medical Conferences of the International Headache Society and other neurological meetings.
- We need to spy on the activities of possible subterfugees and terrorist-like academicians to ensure that they do not succeed in scuttling our ship-of-wonderous logic, our apple-cart of raison-de-etre, the clarity enjoyed by our minds for so long.
- We need to keep such non-believers-in-our-own belief at the tenterhooks, branding them as heretics, declining to permit them to speak in public forums, and to simply burn them at the stake while we keep on grinning from side to side at-our-own-skills at foiling the "opposition".
- We are no longer scientists pursuing the truth disinterestedly but have become politicians with a definitive abrasive agenda that has the capacity to push humankind into the lull of decadent unthinking millennia or eras.
- If you receive acclaim in the wake of your boat-non-rocking submission, it is part of conventional wisdom--why fear, let the wind blow away to a soft breeze to a settled calm. And it will.
- The problem starts when the work is rejected.
- Besides justification of rejection, the rejection should not appear to be as summary as the lynching of-the-suspect-by a kangaroo court.
- Merit-go-to-pot, even a standard-letter-of-rejection appears a waste in these circumstances.
- If you receive acclaim in the wake of your boat-non-rocking submission, it is part of conventional wisdom--why fear, let the wind blow away to a soft breeze to a settled calm. And it will.
- The problem starts when the work is rejected.
- Besides justification of rejection, the rejection should not appear to be as summarily as the lynching of-the-suspect-by a kangaroo court.
- Merit-go-to-pot, even a standard-letter-of-rejection appears a waste in these circumstances.
- The lonely poster is often a sign of disinterest in that field -- now that is indeed a portent of danger of originality.
- While the crowded posters-are-safe with like-minded researchers, the lonely poster is a sign of thinking.
- Sustained thinking is revolutionary per se. A hundred red flags are raised around the lonely poster. Solitary, solitude, independent, new, novel track of thinking -- all are grave indications of the impending collapse-of-the-empire of the past.
- There are certain pre-requisites for original thinking:
- A primary motive of intellectual satisfaction of finding new scientific knowledge (Jerome P. Kassirer, NEJM, 1993; 328: 1634-1636; Denis P. Burkitt, BMJ).
- An uncompromising rather disinterested search for the truth and not to simply notch up publications in high-impact journals
- No personal financial gain as the prime objective
- An act of individual creativity of the prepared mind
- The intuition of unknown things, the imagination that creates new worlds, and the faculty of discovering the hidden relations existing between certain phenomena (Alexis Carrel, 1959)
- Original thinking in science obviously follows no plans (democratic or other human-made principles of capturing and retaining the wealths of the Earth as well as the Universes / Galaxies)
- The ability to see and to create an intelligible synthesis from a large mass of seemingly unconnected phenomena that should be elaborated in a single brain -- and not a committee of scholars or artists or scientists working at the supposedly art-level (Karl Popper, 1978; Alexis Carrel, 1959)
- Islands of solitude where meditation would be possible, to develop the ESP (extra-sensory perception) that creates worlds within worlds
- Kipling's six honest serving men.
- A clearly pre-conceived idea (Claude Bernard, Lancet 1993; 342: 1063-1064)
- Careful phrasing of the research question (Medawar, 1979)
- Academic freedom -- no need to earn daily bread (James McCormick, Lancet 1988; ii: 26.; Neville W. Goodman, BMJ 1993; 306 (17th April): p. 1076
- Scientific integrity -- Richard Feynman, 1993.
- Balancing at the razor's edge with consummate ease (Gupta, 2010, 2011)
- PROF. DR. LEO ESAKI (Nobel Laureate, 1973 - PHYSICS) outlined the five qualities essential for original thinking:
- Willingness and the ability to swim against the current
- A child-like sense of inquiry that is never lost
- Unafraid to question existing knowledge or dogma
- Never thinking that the professor is always right
- Never to attend a Scientific / Medical Conference.
- DATA ARE A TERMINAL FACET OF HUMAN THINKING THAT HAVE REPLACED ORIGINAL THINKING AND THE NEED TO THINK AT ALL OR MUCH IN MIGRAINE RESEARCH, AS WELL AS IN OTHER FIELDS OF MEDICINE DURING THE LAST SEVERAL DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS WELL AS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.
- ALL MIGRAINE RESEARCHERS TEND TO THINK THROUGH NUMBERS -- that is statistics NOW.
- 18 August 2017 New Delhi, India, 10.44 P.M.
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