Why a blog? And why ‘The Intensities’?
Why a blog? Because I enjoy reading them, and I thought I might like writing one. Almost all of the writing I do now is for journal articles and grant applications. As writing, it leaves me unsatisfied.
And why the blog’s title, ‘The Intensities’? My research and clinical work focuses on mood and anxiety disorders. These are intense psychological experiences — negatively intense, but intense in a way that makes them deeply felt human experiences.
The clinical service I work in sees young people between 15 and 25. This is a period that is especially full of intense experiences for most of us: many positive, and many negative. Knausgaard puts it well:
Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Stuggle: Book Four
So ‘The Intensities’ for me captures some loose associations — plus the domain name was free.
Neuroskeptic posted some good advice on writing a science blog a couple of years ago. Perhaps most sobering was the observation, in a companion post, that many blogs don’t make it past a month or two. Given my history with these sorts of things, there is a reasonable chance that that will be the fate of this one. More optimistically, I did talk about getting fit by running for about 10 years — and after a few fits and starts, eventually got to doing it regularly.
