In this episode, I am joined by a fellow Renaissance Woman who has joined me in embracing that identity (you’ll learn why near the start of the show). The title of the episode is, “A Different Kind of Wonderful with Paula Croxson” but my alternative was “How Paula Came to Love Swimming in Chop”. That too will make sense later in the show.
Paula has been near the top of my “dream guests” since I came up with this podcast idea so to say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement. She’s a science communicator, neuroscientist, musician and athlete among other things. The conversation was free flowing, filled with science, storytelling and metaphors galore!
Promised Show Notes Materials (take a drink):
- Sign up for updates on my podcast and what’s happening in the Renaissance People Community.
- Work with me to Find Your Golden Thread
- Jethro Tull (jazz flutist) YouTube video of performance from 1976
- My LinkedIn Left Brain, Right Brain artificial choice rant
- Article from Business Insider where Michelle Obama explains why she too is disgusted by the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- Oliver Sacks biographical information
- Oliver Sacks’ TEDTalk, What Hallucinations Reveal about Our Minds
- NeuWrite
- A Brief History of the Resting State: the Washington University Perspective by Abraham Z Snyder and Marcus E Raichle
- Review of the split brain work that Brenda Milner was part of (credit also to Mike Gazzaniga for this research)
- Story Collider
- Paula’s 2013 Story Collider talk: When Your Grandmother Forgets Who You Are
- Ep. 9 A Mind for Memory with Brian Skellenger, Survivalist
- If you want to become a better storyteller, I highly recommend the podcast The Story Letter with Micaela Blei.
- Stellate Communications
- Ep. 8 Bringing Worlds Together Full Circle with Jess Rowell, Renaissance Woman discusses “find your audience’s why” to help answer “what do you do?”
- Sign up for Brain Dump on May 1, 2026 (or if you missed it, sign up for my Renaissance People newsletter to find future opportunities)
- Paula’s greatest accomplishment post Instagram | Facebook
- Cholla walking inspiration LinkedIn post
- Stellate Communications
Follow Paula on Social Media:
Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram | Bluesky
A few things Paula and I discuss:
- Survey says…she’s a Renaissance Woman
- The science vs musician choice
- The history and misconceptions of “left brain vs right brain”
- Renaissance Man, neuroscientists, and inspirational figure, Oliver Sacks
- The athletic mindset + Renaissance People = Flow State
- Research on the flow state (it’s not all woo woo)
- What MRIs tell us (and don’t tell us)
- Why the science is in the nuance and complicating the narrative
- Paula’s major career pivot
- Explaining yourself using communications 101, Know thy Audience
- Values as a golden thread
- How Paula stopped fighting the waves and began enjoying them
- Improv Game
- Rapidish Fire Questions
- Life as an omnivert
- Training our pets to do unusual things
Quotes from the episode:
(Paula) I think of boundary spanner maybe as a really useful professional term. But I feel like a Renaissance Person all the time, regardless of whether I'm behaving like a professional or not.
(Paula) I feel like science and music was one of those choices that I had to make pretty early on, that I've spoken to so many people who ended up in science or as musicians who felt like they had to make that choice early on in order to define themself, to carve out what they were doing. When I say had to, I don't think anyone made me. I had a lot of really supportive people around me when I was figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. But I felt like it only made sense to be one or the other. And I actually stopped playing music for a really long time, while I was in graduate school. And so I sometimes forget that I'm a musician because I spent so much time creating this version of myself that was the scientist.
(Sara) People sometimes have a job where they'll be a reporter and they'll be a meteorologist. So I decided, I'm gonna bring math and science back into my life. And quite a few people in the journalism program looked at me like I was absolutely nuts because I took chemistry. I took physics. I was taking calculus. And they're all like, "Why? What are you? What's wrong with you? What are you doing?" And I was like, no! I need this! This is part of me too. I can't lose that. I need to use my full brain and not "half of my brain" as the people like to talk about it.
(Paula) That's how the left brain got a reputation for being the "logical", I'm using air quotes here, the "logical side of the brain". Because it rationalized. Because it got in there and it was chatty and explained away the movements of the right hemisphere, having no idea that the whole reason was because the right hemisphere of the brain had just seen a spoon and was responding to the question. So that's how that whole myth arose is because the left hemisphere of the brain talks a lot. However, that doesn't really make it more logical.
(Paula) I had already been interested in the brain and how it worked. But that was one of the things that really drew me in, was reading that book. Little did I know at the time that Oliver Sacks was, himself, a real Renaissance Person!
(Sara) Yeah!
(Paula) He entered that part of his career, the medical part of his career, late in life and the writing and storytelling part even later in life. He was also a bodybuilder. He also swam in the open water. He had all of these facets to himself that were not just what he did for a living. I think I probably was drawn to that as much as the stories and the fascination of the brain, even though I wasn't really aware of it at the time.
(Paula) I started off by joining a group called NeuWrite that was a science writing group that brought together scientists, writers, people in theater, meet people from the media, you know, to collaborate.
My goal was just to write better science papers so that I could get published in my, like, niche journals, but like fancier niche journals that would get me, like tenure and promotion and funding.
But I was around these people and I liked these people and I was drawn to them. And I found myself learning a lot from them in a way that I didn't learn from my colleagues who were in the same niches as me doing the same things, thinking very deeply about MRI and whether this analysis technique worked. And they were wonderful too. But this was a different kind of wonderful.
(Paula) Then I got it. I got that it didn't need to be special or different. What made it relatable to people was that it wasn't special or different, that it was similar to their story, that they weren't by themself. That they could relate to it. That I put into words something that they were struggling with.
And it was so devastating for me in the best possible way. Like all of that affectation that I had had that I just needed to be this like very, very talented special niche researcher doing my thing in my, in my little vacuum just fell away. And I realized that I was a human being, doing a human endeavor that could help other human beings.
(Paula) Figure out who you're talking to. And in a one-on-one situation, you have the ability to do that. And then connect with them about something. So that might mean that I end up telling somebody that I'm a musician or that I'm a scientist, when that isn't like my main day job thing that I do. But that's one of the joys of being somebody who does many things, right? Is that you have many points of contact in many, many ways to connect with folks.
(Paula) I knew who I was for so long through the lens of being a scientist and a researcher, and I had my entire career mapped out. You know, I knew who I was gonna be and where I was gonna be when I was in my nineties if I made it that far and hadn't worked myself into the ground, which was a real possibility. I knew that I was gonna be some kind of emeritus professor roaming the halls of some university, you know. Writing a book, amassing my life's work. I knew exactly how I was gonna be, and I blew all of that up when I changed careers at the old age of 38, and stepped into a field that I had no formal education in.
(Sara) When the pandemic hit, for example, if you'd been in the lab and had all these people scheduled to come in for their MRIs and then the lab had been shut down, like that would've completely ruined those plans or thrown them out or, required things to change. Versus now you're kind of floating on the river and following the current, as opposed to, "I'm just gonna force this, I'm going north no matter what, I'm going north.” You now are kind of like letting the flow of the river, to go back to flow, kind of guide you. And then you're adjusting. And if you get in an eddy, you're gonna do a little spinning around for a bit and then you'll keep going.
(Sara) We always grew up thinking that a career and a steady job and knowing what singular "I'm gonna be when I grow up" is going to give me more certainty. But actually being in this freedom to follow the things, the opportunities that arise, the serendipity that comes forth, is almost more reliable. Because you have yourself. You'll always have yourself. You'll always have your values that can't be taken away from you just because you lose a job or you can't access an MRI machine.
Follow me, Renaissance Woman Sara Kobilka, on LinkedIn, where I put most of my social media energy, and Facebook.
If you’re extra curious, check out Renaissance Woman Consulting to learn more about some of the many types of work I do.
And should you care to support the production of this podcast, I’d love it if you’d buy me an oat milk cappuccino, my caffeinated beverage of choice.
This podcast is hosted and edited by Sara Kobilka.
Theme music is by Brian Skellenger
Podcast distribution support provided by K.O. Myers of Particulate Media
