An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [18]
It was a wonderful experience: I learned to code and analyze data, program computers, review the research literature, design studies, and write up scientific papers for publication. The professor I was working with was studying the structure of human personality, and I found the idea of investigating individual differences among people absolutely fascinating. I immersed myself in the work and found it not only a source of education and income, but escape as well. Unlike attendance at classes—which seemed stifling and, like the rest of the worlds schedules, based on an assumption of steadiness and consistency in moods and performance—the research life allowed an independence and flexibility of schedule that I found exhilarating. University administrators do not consider the pronounced seasonal changes in behaviors and abilities that are part and parcel of the lives of most manic-depressives. My undergraduate transcript, consequently, was riddled with failing grades and incompleted classes, but my research papers, fortunately, offset my often dreary grades. My mercurial moods and recurrent, very black depressions took a huge personal and academic toll during those college years.
At the age of twenty, after two years of undergraduate studies, I took off a year from the turmoil that had become my life to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My brother and cousin were studying at English universities at the time, and they suggested that I come over and join them. But I had been deeply affected by the Scottish music and poetry that my father loved, and there was something very appealing to me in the Celtic melancholy and fire that I associated with the Scottish side of my ancestry, even though I at the same time wanted to get away from my father’s black, unpredictable moods. Not entirely away, however; I think I had a vague notion that I might better understand my own chaotic feelings and thinking if I returned in some sense to the source. I applied for a federal grant, which enabled me for the first time to become a full-time student, and I left Los Angeles for a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night.
St. Andrews, my tutor was saying, was the only place he knew where it snowed horizontally. An eminent neurophysiologist, he was a tall, lanky, and droll Yorkshireman who, like many of his fellow English, believed that rather superior weather, to say nothing of civilization, ended where the Scottish countryside began. He had a point about the weather. The ancient, gray-stoned town of St. Andrews sits right on the North Sea and takes blasts of late-autumn and winter winds that have to be experienced to be believed. I had been living in Scotland for several months by that time, and I had become a definite believer. The winds were especially harsh just off the town’s East Sands, where the university’s marine biology laboratory had been built.
There were ten or so of us third-year zoology students, and we were sitting, shivering, wool layered, wool gloved, and teeth chattering, in the damp cold of the tank-filled laboratory. My tutor seemed even more puzzled by my being in these advanced zoology courses than I was. He was an authority on what one might have thought was a somewhat specialized portion of the animal kingdom, namely the auditory nerve of the locust, and just prior to his remarks about horizontal snowfalls in Scotland he had put my striking ignorance of zoological matters out into the public domain.
The task at hand was to set up electrophysiological recordings from the locust’s auditory nerve; the rest of the students—all of whom had been specializing in science for many years—had already, and neatly, dissected