My name is Nick, and I was born and raised near Chicago, Illinois. I completed my biomedical engineering degree at Vanderbilt University (2015), my medical degree at the University of Illinois in Chicago (2019), and my psychiatry residency at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (2023). I’m currently a practicing psychiatrist in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
When I started writing in college, my thoughts were mostly about my classwork, and my ideas began from an interest in the origin of life and the physics of biological systems. I wanted to understand how nature, seemingly chaotic, could produce such seeming harmony—how perpetual order could arise from a universe of perpetual disorder. Having just left the Christian faith, I often wondered about the absurdity of my existence. But I couldn’t dismiss the feeling that life was something to be cherished, that humanity wasn’t so meaningless. So I began to observe the world more broadly, looking for patterns in everything from physics to economics, from religion to politics. And as I connected the dots, I glimpsed a picture that has captivated my imagination. What began as a scientific curiosity has expanded into a perspective that I find wholly satisfying.
The following is an excerpt from an article published in The Atlantic by Nancy Andreasen, a neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity:
Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. …Of course, having too many ideas can be dangerous. One subject, a scientist, described to me “a willingness to take an enormous risk with your whole heart and soul and mind on something where you know the impact—if it worked—would be utterly transformative.” The if here is significant. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist. “Everybody has crazy things they want to try,” that same subject told me. “Part of creativity is picking the little bubbles that come up to your conscious mind, and picking which one to let grow and which one to give access to more of your mind, and then have that translate into action.”
I’ve always had a lot of ideas, and most of them are pretty bad. But this one, if it’s true, holds implications for science, society, and humanity at large. The if here is significant. And if it fails to motivate some positive change in the world, then it should, at the very least, make for some fantastic science fiction.
if truth exists 