A potted history of Michael Breakspear

My father vanished with a shift in the breeze, his departure announced when my sisters found his wardrobe empty while playing hide and seek. Thereafter it was left to Claire Breakspear to carry the entire parenting load, working for the first time since age 19 in the local high school library, traipsing toddler breaky and my three sisters around Sydney in a VW. Sundays driving between our house in suburban Epping and Manly beach, sand-covered foam surfboard on my lap in the back seat.

1970s Australia was originally unkind to single mothers, expelling them from polite society for the philandering behaviours of their husbands. But Whitlam was elected to power in 1972 and Claire triumphed over her middle-class neighbours with the “faultless divorce” reform of the Family Court allowing her to unshackle from the absent John Breakspear and forge ahead with with her determination and aspirations.

Schooling:

I grew up in Sydney and Canberra where I was fortunate to go through a public education system that was strong technically (e.g. mathematics) but also in critical thinking and creativity (e.g. the year 9 “poetry of rock” class, with everyone sitting under blankets listening to Pink Floyd). In chemistry we made beer, plastic and explosives. I also scored low passes in cooking, sewing, woodwork and metal work, everyday skills of improvising badly in practical matters that I still possess.

The 1980s saw the emergence of the “personal computer” – we had a computer lab at high school, with Macintosh and Commodore Vic PCs. My first computer was a Vic64 (with 64kB of memory, it was an upgrade from the Vic20!) which I plugged into the TV set at home and wrote video games in BASIC. There was no hard-disc and everything was stored on small cassette tapes, the same type as the 80’s music cassettes my older sister would give me. To pirate commercial games, I would play them on my cassette stereo deck (also used to play formative adolescent music like David Bowie, the Cure, Blondie and Mental as Anything) and record the modem-like sounds it emitted on my other sister’s cassette deck – transcription errors could then be edited out manually in BASIC. To make a visual display you would have to learn the 16-bit memory address of every pixel on the TV screen, then “poke” a colour (a numeric value) into its registry to flesh out the game. That was the beginning of my coding career, writing games in front of the box after school. Because of the vagaries of school, I didn’t actually write much code again until I started my PhD 18 years later, by then on a laptop with an actual hard drive – oh wow, and 4MB of memory. That was not sooo long ago.

Even though my best grades were in maths and physics, my teachers and mother impressed on me the need to read a lot of novels; a habit that likely assisted my later scientific writing. I even briefly cultivated aspirations of writing (novels) for a career. So, I encourage novel reading for budding scientists and still read before I collapse into sleep at night.

I also played quite a lot of sport – was actually an okay swimmer, despite the untrained windmill action. I could do a decent lap of butterfly in a relay, but so “uniquely” that Ben Oxenbold who was once doing the leg after me fell of the blocks laughing and we came last. On the rugby field I showed a particular talent for getting my skinny body tangled in the legs of much larger youth when they ran by with the football, causing both of us to fall more heavily to the earth than anticipated. I also had long curly hair that caused confusion and misjudgement to the opposing players as I ran by. So, I did actually play in the fullback position for the school team for a few years until I was eventually trampled over and carted off with a corked thigh never to return. True story. Oh, I could also bowl leg spinners in cricket, once again relying on a “unique style” – and a very high trajectory – to confuse the opposing batsmen who tended to either mis-hit it or cart it out of the park like Sputnik.

 These days I’m rather addicted to surfing. Depending on the skills of the other surfers nearby I would rate myself as a solid okay surfer – can get across a wave with some velocity - and previously mentioned skills in swimming mean that I don’t mind “versing” large waves.

Tertiary Education:

I started medicine at the University of Sydney straight out of school, much to the disapproval of my mother who thought I should study mathematics. Although I enjoyed medicine enough, I did experience separation anxiety from mathematics and other learned subjects. I also went through a bit of a romantic phase, thinking that university should be an opportunity to learn more about life than the blood supply of the intestine (which has more arteries than the brain, if I recall correctly). I borrowed a book from the physics library on the theories of Einstein, and thought if I read it attentively I would be sufficiently clever to understand relativity. Well, close attention or not, it doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, you cannot understand relativity using high school mathematics. Then I found out you could dual enrol in Arts and Medicine and so did that, focussing on philosophy and mathematics and some (modern) history (but mainly mathematics). I did enjoy philosophy, mainly post-modernism and critical theory, which now might be seen to meld into “cancel culture”, although to be frank, back then (and still) there was a lot of crap to be cancelled. My favourite modern philosopher was Paul Feyerabend whose “methodological anarchism” critiqued the scientific method as a form of “cosmological monism”. Back then I was cool with that, but these days I’m all into saving science and the world from the crazies. There’s too much at stake and too little room for the nuances and clever counter-arguments of Feyerabend.

I did enjoy maths a lot and even fancied leaving medicine to pursue it full time. But I stuck at the dual training thing. Eventually I reached the stage of mathematical training to understand the theory of relativity. So yeah, box ticked. But by then I was more into the tangled chaotic trajectories of a French mathematician, Henri Poincare. What I really liked about maths is that I barely understood the lectures, then struggled through the assignments (often in a group) – but after answering the questions (often a day for each), everything became obvious. It was very different from the slow accrual of medical knowledge with its attendant pink-stained histology slides, muscles named in Latin, Krebb’s cycles, organs in formaldehyde, tangled facial nerves, and stethoscopes, all of which was trivial to grasp at the time, but accumulated into an unlikely formless morass of things to remember for the exams. Maths students – erroneously thought of as “nerds” - tended to grow wild hair and play music in bands, contrasting with the upwardly ambitious medical folk (except for the randoms I befriended and who encouraged my early “catastrophe theory of the brain”).

After three years of the arts-medicine shenanigans, I took a year out of lectures and completed a one year elective study – a BSc(med) – studying the neurobiology of a nerve centre called the peri-aqueductal grey (physiology, histology; retrograde cell staining, frozen microtome sections, all that classic wet lab stuff). By then I also finished enough mathematics to get into a post-graduate program at the University of California (Santa Cruz) for another year off medicine– also experiencing the joys of living in America, of which I have very fond and deep memories. As well as mathematics, I studied Central American history and thereafter spent four months doing an elective medical term in El Salvador, basically learning Spanish, travelling around Central America in former school buses from the USA and visiting medical clinics in small villages.

After all of these rather memorable experiences, I returned to Australia and finished medicine, whilst living in rather busy and chaotic share house situations. Books sat on the shelf as I listened for the mysterious fourth heart sound that would get me past the final exams and through to being a medical doctor.

Post-graduate studies:

I left University after 8 years of medicine and the various digressions to start my medical residency. I bought a VW bug and lived a relatively normal life without all the crazy years of studying. I moved to a country town (Lismore) and did my residency there, living in a farmhouse and planning at that stage to become a grown-up doctor of some sort, perhaps in intensive care. On the weekend, we drove to the coast and slept on the beach (which btw is much colder at night than the pamphlets say). Physicians in country hospitals spent more time with their patients and less with their pompous colleagues than in the city. They were generally great physicians who moved away from the ostentatious city hospitals and I learned a lot during those times, not just about clinical work but also of valuing everybody equally in the workplace. But I moved back to Sydney with Jessica Ferguson and started training in psychiatry. Before I knew it, I was back at the University of Sydney, enrolled in a PhD and studying equations again, juggling my time between that and acute psychiatry with the heavy over-time expected in those times. There was one infamous shift that started at 9am Friday and finished 4 days later 5pm Monday. Between beginning and end there was a lot of psychotic people to be seen and on the other weekends, parties to go to. In Sydney, at least at that time, people would still be turning up to parties the following day, curtains drawn against the sun, music playing, everyone crowded in the kitchen drinking cheap beer from tin cans and smoking badly rolled joints.

I took another gap year in 2000 (Jessica decided to live in London) and spent that part of my PhD in the School of Mathematics at the University of Surrey. I published my first paper with my acting supervisor Pete Aswin, kicking off my publication record with the auspicious words, “Suppose that f:M→M is a smooth map of some M=Rm to itself …” – and so my career as a scientist got rolling (and still rolls). I worked as a locum in a mental health service in Sutton for the most chronically unwell, an excellent recovery-focussed program where I recall assessing one woman in her home while her parrot sat on my head, all of us stony faced.  I published some more papers on dynamics, time series analysis, statistics and then embarked on my first translational paper, using nonlinear dynamics for a different take on the “disconnection hypothesis” of schizophrenia. We moved back to Sydney and lived in a shack near Maroubra beach, thereby giving me a chance to improve my surfing skills and write up my PhD. After what seemed like an eternity and a very large can of Indonesian coffee, I completed my PhD in 2003. My neighbour finished his PhD on “post-soviet television culture” (a 700 page magnum opus) and my best friend up the street completed his surgical training, good cause for celebrating with an undressed run around the neighbourhood and a night swim in the ocean.

I continued my own psychiatry training, swapping between the emergency department and maths lectures, often within the hour. With colleagues from the crisis team, people were assessed at home, in police cells, in the ED, on the street, in homeless persons shelters. People slept rough in various streets outside the large homeless person shelters, living in improvised communities according to diagnosis and addiction, a self-organized arrangement that optimised local economic exchange. Except that is for those with chronic schizophrenia, who trod their own paths through the city, sleeping rough in the Church grounds and underneath the overpass, shoes falling apart from medication-induced restlessness, the world driving by in suits, desensitized to the homeless persons with a medical disorder afflicted their thinking.

 In all this time, as well as becoming a psychiatrist, I learned quite a lot of applied mathematics and physics; Fourier transforms, heteroclinic folds, partial differential equations and their boundary conditions, fractal basin boundaries, Floquet multipliers etc. Possessing that knowledge is something I have been able to put to good use, together with the histology of the peri-aqueductal grey, the blood supply of the colon, the semiotics of Pink Floyd, Jacques Lacan’s “mirror phase”, Miles Davis, Steel Pole Bath Tub and the other bits and pieces that I encountered during these educational decades.

At the end of all of this I ended up with,

BA (Hons) – Peixoto’s Theorem and the Hermeneutic tradition

BSc Med (Hons) –microtomes and retrograde tracers

MB BS (Hons) – the blood supply of the colon is via the 73 branches of the mesenteric artery

PhD – brain tangles of the heteroclinic, not amyloid, variety

FANZCP - psychogeography of inner city microeconomies

On the whole I’d had a very fortunate journey, but I’d also experienced ups and downs, the details of which I may describe elsewhere.