Games of Mind with a TalTech lecturer Julius Juurmaa
Resident Physician in Radiology and university lecturer by day, PhD student and reader by night Julius Juurmaa is talking about his path, teaching in the field of health care and mechanisms in our brain.
Experiences, ideas and creativity
During the day, I am a resident physician in radiology, but at night, I occasionally turn into a PhD student. Outside the hospital and university setting, I am lucky to have an amazing wife, a 3-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter.
I would not exactly call my path to where I am now a career. It has been rocky and confusing for both me and the people closest to me. After graduating from secondary school, I spent two years studying physics and worked as a software developer in the Institute of the Estonian Language; only after that did I switch to studying medicine. When I was in my fifth year of medical studies, I started taking work shifts in the department of internal medicine at the county hospital in Viljandi. In many ways these few years of lonely nights shaped me as a person and as a physician. After receiving my degree, I started residency in radiology and, a year later, began my PhD studies. Actually, from the neuroscience perspective trying (and failing at) different things makes perfect sense. The current understanding of the neurological underpinnings of creativity can be summarized in four words: blind variation, selective retention. Our brain is constantly forming random combinations from our experiences, and from these, the potentially useful or interesting ones are kept. So more diverse experiences (hopefully) translate to more interesting ideas. Moreover, most of the things that I’ve done in my life, but failed to create a career out of, have stayed on as hobbies: I still occasionally play the piano, programming forms a sizable chunk from my PhD project, and not being overly terrified of mathematical formulae has also been quite nice.
Current occupation
My PhD project concerns a movement disorder brought about by abuse of a designer psychostimulant. I’m currently working on modeling the motor network of the brain (ie. parts of the brain that participate in moving our body around) as a directed graph and comparing this directed graph between these patients and healthy people. The motor network with its numerous parallel feedback loops is a very intriguing subject in itself and, very occasionally, during brief moments of insanity, I think I almost understand what I’m doing. At TalTech, I am currently teaching most of a course called Imaging and Signals in Medicine in the Health Care Technology MSc programme. The idea behind the course is that although the various expensive machines that capture biological signals in health care, from EKG to ultrasound to MRI, look very different on the surface, the stages of acquiring, processing, and visualizing biological signals are remarkably similar across all of them. Most of my practical seminars consist of me “torturing” my students with imaging physics before looking at the actual machines in action at the department of radiology in East Tallinn Central Hospital. But there are also a few more theoretical seminars — in my personal favourite, we move from cell biology to artificial intelligence in less than forty slides.
I also give radiology seminars to the third-year medical students at the University of Tartu.
About teaching
My students would be better judges of my teaching style. My seminars don’t quite end like Macbeth (ie. most students come out of them alive), but they’re probably not too different either ( laughing-editor).
I deeply enjoy teaching. In some sense, the role of a physician is to work against information asymmetry, whether we are consulting patients or teaching colleagues. In my mind, terms like “teaching hospital” or “teaching physician” are redundant. Teaching is an integral part of medicine, so we should instead call “teaching physicians” simply physicians and figure out a new term for people who avoid dealing with younger colleagues. Luckily, the latter group is a minority anyway.
Health Care and outside world
I’m almost constantly amazed by my MSc students. I strongly feel that health care needs to be looked at with fresh eyes and new perspectives, and honestly, six years of medical studies and up to five years of residency don’t exactly guarantee any of those. Therefore, such study programmes as Health Care Technology are there to cover this dire need for people, who still remember what the outside world looks like, but also understand the inner mechanism of the health care system to some extent.
Plans for future
My immediate future is connected to the daunting prospect of my residency finals. After that, I hope to be able to offer some overdue affection to my PhD project.
Recently, I’ve thought more and more about the diagnostic process in medicine, its underlying logical operations and the acknowledgment and mitigation of cognitive errors. I think these topics should play a far bigger role in various fields ranging from medical education to the design of processes and interfaces in healthcare. Today, these issues are, in my personal opinion, largely neglected, and my dream is to change that, if at all possible.
Free-time activities
I enjoy hiking and there are ample opportunities for that in Estonia. Why not skip creating startups for a few days, take a train to Aegviidu and have a nice walk in a bog?
Books and Music
In primary and secondary school, I spent most of my time avoiding whatever was on the compulsory reading list at any given time and immersing myself in science fiction instead. The first thing that springs to mind is The Hyperion books by Dan Simmons or Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, or anything by Ursula K. LeGuin. I also enjoy reading poetry.
During my medical studies I, like many of my colleagues, forgot how to read properly, and started skimming for facts instead. While being a nice party trick, and useful in the professional setting, it’s also incredibly annoying when I try to read fiction. When I recently re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series in a one-week-long frenzy, I spent the first few days repeatedly discovering that I’d somehow moved on thirty pages and apparently skipped most of it. Regarding music, I have got perhaps a rather particular taste that doesn’t necessarily respect genre borders. The Polish jazz scene (eg. Jazzpospolita, Leszek Mozdzer, Marcin Wasilewski etc.) is fascinatingly diverse and keeps throwing surprises at me. Among local groups, Miljardid is absolutely brilliant these days.
Originally published at https://medium.com on June 10, 2020.
