I always find it easier to motivate myself to research something if there’s an immediate application. Sometimes this is an actual immediate application, such as reading an article on nutrition and thereby deciding it would be a good idea to buy a certain kind of food next time I’m at the store. But sometimes what I want to research doesn’t have such a quick, visceral effect on my action, in which case manufacturing an immediate application is what I often find necessary to motivate myself.
To be specific, what I usually do is try to write an article on the subject. This seems to signal to my brain that there really is an immediate application to this research (using the information to write an article), but of course this is more of a hack than anything else, as not everything has a practical application (demonstrating a meaningful distinction), but everything can of course be made into an article (throwing the meaningful distinction of “does this have a practical application?” to the wayside, despite my brain feeling like the answer is “yes, this action I’m taking right now (writing the article) is the practical application!”)
So yeah, I don’t know whether you’re sufficiently similar to me in this respect for this suggestion to be useful, but it does seem to be that this may be a common brain setting (feel motivation if there’s a clear practical application for acquiring the knowledge, don’t feel motivation if there isn’t), and it also seems like what you’re working on (reading highly detailed descriptions of mechanisms in molecular biology for the purpose of something far away in the future) may be just the sort of thing that one’s brain may find boring because the practical application is not enough in near mode, and thus may benefit from the hack I’ve suggested (writing articles on the topic to give your brain something sufficiently visceral to grasp onto for motivation).
I always find it easier to motivate myself to research something if there’s an immediate application. Sometimes this is an actual immediate application, such as reading an article on nutrition and thereby deciding it would be a good idea to buy a certain kind of food next time I’m at the store. But sometimes what I want to research doesn’t have such a quick, visceral effect on my action, in which case manufacturing an immediate application is what I often find necessary to motivate myself.
To be specific, what I usually do is try to write an article on the subject. This seems to signal to my brain that there really is an immediate application to this research (using the information to write an article), but of course this is more of a hack than anything else, as not everything has a practical application (demonstrating a meaningful distinction), but everything can of course be made into an article (throwing the meaningful distinction of “does this have a practical application?” to the wayside, despite my brain feeling like the answer is “yes, this action I’m taking right now (writing the article) is the practical application!”)
So yeah, I don’t know whether you’re sufficiently similar to me in this respect for this suggestion to be useful, but it does seem to be that this may be a common brain setting (feel motivation if there’s a clear practical application for acquiring the knowledge, don’t feel motivation if there isn’t), and it also seems like what you’re working on (reading highly detailed descriptions of mechanisms in molecular biology for the purpose of something far away in the future) may be just the sort of thing that one’s brain may find boring because the practical application is not enough in near mode, and thus may benefit from the hack I’ve suggested (writing articles on the topic to give your brain something sufficiently visceral to grasp onto for motivation).
This is similar to another frequently-recommended technique: Teach the material to someone else.
This definitely sounds like something that would help me feel more active with my research, I’ll have to try it, thanks!