I don’t know when to stop – 07/12/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Another transatlantic flight, another six hours of uninterrupted work. Strapped to a chair, with no options but to go to the bathroom or grab something gluten-free from the meal tray, without e-mails, internet, messages, students, or dogs and cats around my desk wanting attention, I write pretty well . What else is left for me to do?

But this time, the post-departure chat with the neuroscientist colleague beside me, commenting on the meeting from which the two of us were returning and exchanging notes about our knowledge of autism, had left something in particular running in the background of my head. David Leopold is a researcher at the US National Institute of Mental Health, specializing in sensory processing, and we talked, among other things, about the difficulty of people on the autistic spectrum in recognizing their own emotions. I went to the bathroom, he fell asleep, I kept thinking about the consequences of that difficulty, and therefore, on a table, about the everyday functions of those emotions.

“Emotion” is a name that evokes something additional that adds color to life, but what the word represents goes much deeper than that. Every emotion is a bodily, physiological, visceral state that we associate with a mental state. I’ve already noticed that anyone who knows me knows long before me when I’m bothered or irritated; my penny only dawns the next day, and only another day later is when I usually discover the reason for the discomfort.

The conversation made me realize that exhaustion is also an emotion—and my difficulty recognizing its signs is both a superpower and a problem. I remembered the story on a Radiolab podcast about the woman who became an ultramarathoner after undergoing surgery to remove part of the temporal cortex to resolve epilepsy. In her words: as she now didn’t see the time pass, she didn’t know how much time had elapsed, so she didn’t feel psychological exhaustion — and kept running. That woman is me, and my marathon is my research paper.

At this point in the championship, I had already accepted that my work pattern is not a little bit every day: it’s what happens between varied tasks, and then A LOT every time I can take a few whole days of work concentrated on a single topic , followed by exhaustion and then a day or two of recovery and complete non-productivity — which I’ve at least learned to enjoy guilt-free. Once the series marathon is over, with my brain turned off on the sofa, the exhaustion will have passed, and I will once again be dying to wrestle again with some of the many scientific juggling I keep in the air.

Now I understand why. There are people who don’t feel pain; i feel the physical pain, but not the mental pain of my neurons asking for the potty unless they are already falling through the tables. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. I just know it works…

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