Reply to comment

Coming into this seminar, I was expecting some kind of huge lit review where we discussed current trends in scientific neurology research, and I didn't think there was any possible way that we would be able to have interesting discussions with such a large group of people. As the semester went on, I was so amazed and excited to participate in some extremely interesting and thought provoking discussions about such a wide range of subjects that I might not have originally thought were a part of "neural and behavioral sciences."

I feel like I was most taken by the concept of individuality and diversity. I think that every discussion we had benefitted by the inclusion of the idea that we are all unique and that we cannot fully understand the experiences of other people. We talked about such large topics as love, morality, and conciousness, where we inevitably came to the conclusion that we cannot come to a conclusion, because these experiences are so subjective and personal. Even in our discussions about pain and psychotherapy/psychopharmacology, we kept coming back to the concept of individual difference and the difficulty of many types of "typical" biomedicine to grapple with these issues in a productive way. I think that this seminar experience will do a great job for our class of future doctors and researchers to try in small ways to change these viewpoints that everyone is the same and the same treatment or educational setting is appropriate for everyone.

I was also so struck during the semester about how so many of us focused on popular media articles, from newspapers instead of scientific journals. It really gave me a sense of how widespread NBS topics are and that it is not only the scientific community that is focusing on these ideas, but rather our society as a whole.

Thank you to everyone for such a great discussion this semester and best of luck on your theses!