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Like pretty much everyone else has said, I was surprised at how much this course challenged my ideas of both neuroscience and science in general. As biology/psychology majors, we’re all used to taking classes that primarily focus on informing you about what we ‘know’ in the field. This class, on the other hand, served more to bring to light a lot of the things that we don’t (and possible never will) know, and I think that that is just as valuable.

I’ve found that one of the issues brought up in this class that has really stuck with me is the idea that scientists tend to analyze their data from a biased perspective. Relating to what Emily said, when we do experiments and get results, we tend to try to make our results fit our hypotheses, and if they don’t we assume that something went wrong. Instead, we should probably be more seriously considering what alternate ideas or theories the results could suggest. I’ve definitely thought about this while analyzing the results from my thesis.

Overall, I enjoyed all of our discussions, but found the animal models/animal ethics topic to be particularly relevant. It made me think a lot about what I am and am not comfortable with in terms of working with animals, and will probably influence what I end up deciding to do in the future. I also thought our discussion on diversity to be particularly important, especially considering that many of the topics that were covered later on were strongly based in the ideas of individual differences and spectrums.

Thanks to everyone for a great semester!