‘Total surprise’

“When I learned that I would become one of the co-authors… my first reaction was total surprise. I did not solicit this in any way… and yet it happened. After the initial shock, I felt great joy, pride, and satisfaction that my contribution to the project was so appreciated,” Kruk told TVP World via email.

“Citizen scientists also have the ability to identify and label particular types of neurons. The process involved combing through the available scientific literature, articles… finding descriptions and/or images of neurons already found by other scientists in other studies, and then comparing them to the neurons we found,” Kruk wrote.

“This process of searching on my own was another motivation for me to keep going. I felt that in this way I was no longer just processing existing data, but also doing real research. Many of the neurons we found had not been described anywhere in the literature before.”

Kruk, who graduated in electrical engineering from the Kielce University of Technology but has no formal education in neuroscience or bioinformatics, has been involved in citizen science for almost eight years in the field of ‘connectomics’ with projects organized by Eyewire, a citizen science project started at Princeton University.

“It started with the Eyewire project, where we recreated the structure of a section of a mouse retina. Eyewire is, de facto, a game… there are points, levels of progress, achievements, competitions,” he wrote.

“I devote as much time as possible to each of these projects,” he continued. “Every day I try to get at least a little done, but I usually spend up to a dozen hours a day on brain mapping.”

Counteracting anxiety

\ Kruk added that the work on mapping has helped him overcome the anxiety and depression linked to his disorder.

“The first motivation was simply to kill time and occupy my brain with something interesting; to take my thoughts away from the constant negativity,” he told TVP World.

“Later it was the desire to belong to a group of ‘nerds’ similar to me, as well as simply competing to see who would score more points, do more tasks in a day.”

“One of the problems of social phobia is the feeling of uselessness,” he added. “[Even if] a person would like to do something interesting, achieve something, improve something in the world around us, they are held back by their own emotions and fears, making them feel inferior, useless, a burden on society, and a waste of his time in this world.

“These thoughts cause the phobia to intensify further, the fears become stronger, depression and other very unpleasant symptoms appear.

“Thanks to citizen science, I can at least combat this overwhelming sense of uselessness. I finally feel that I am doing something useful, that I am contributing to the development of humanity and not wasting my time,” he added.