Passion versus obsession

The consequence of this is that neuroscientists spend almost all of their time doing work that is far removed from the big questions in neuroscience, work that is often minutely constrained in scope. But to a neuroscientist, this one particular facet of the field contains an entire world of inquiry. Whole careers are spent exploring this single facet, sometimes at great cost to the investigator's personal life.

What drives this behavior? Is it a sort of pathological obsession? Or is it part of the sacrifice that arises from pursuing one's passion?

Recently, while I was interviewing at Harvard, I brought this question up at dinner. (We were eating in the North End of Boston at a good Italian restaurant -- it's nice to be wooed.) I didn't need to bring up the context; as fellow nascent neuroscientists, the students and interviewees at my end of the table understood the relevance of the question. We'd been talking about the differential addictiveness of cigarettes and alcohol, and some people maintained that you can have a few drinks a day for a long time without becoming an alcoholic, but that a few cigarettes a day quickly and inevitably balloons into a strong addiction. So when I asked the difference between obsession and passion, one guy named Jeff quipped, "The same as between cigarettes and alcohol!"

This produced a bunch of guffaws (I guess that, having done well on the GREs, Harvard neuroscience grad students follow analogies easily), but I almost missed the joke, because my mind was brewing (it had nothing to do with the wine, I swear). "Maybe it's that the pursuit of obsession produces relief, whereas the pursuit of passion produces pleasure," I said.

This is about as far as I've gotten. Except that recently, I've been reading the Dark Tower series, by Stephen King. And in the second book, there's a confrontation between Roland and the (nascent!) gunslinger, Eddie. Eddie accuses Roland of being willing to sacrifice everything to achieve his goal of locating the Dark Tower. Roland agrees, but rejoins to the effect that there is nobility in purpose, and this nobility is a source of meaning in life. Maybe I'm reading into it, a bit -- I'll get the quote into this essay soon. But it made me think about this passion versus obsession question.