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I think this class has given us a lot to think about when it comes to the relationship between brain and behavior. I definitely didn’t expect for the nervous system to be as complex as I found out it was. I was surprised over the course of this semester to find out about how the nervous system acts and the different ways in which it acts. There is a complexity that I didn’t appreciate before about the nervous system and this has brought that to light. The nervous system cannot be confined to neurons and synapses and neurotransmitters, it is a system which “thinks” in many ways for the entire body unit. I placed ‘thinks’ in quotations because I believe that what I have learned about the nervous system has also changed how I consider the process of thinking. Brain processes in general seem much more complex (and somewhat overwhelming), and this wasn’t the case before. Although I knew different areas of the brain frequently work together to produce a behavior, it is startling how that has been taken to a new degree.

In writing this post I feel as though I sound naïve. I think this course has really been able to get me to think about the nervous system in a different way and to think about neural processes as much more of communication. I am still not sure how I feel about where the I-function fits into all of this. I can’t decide if I like the I-function or if I am disappointed by it. It never seems to work quite the way I hoped it to. I think the I-function complicates what are traditionally thought of as conscious and unconscious processes. For me, the jury is still out about how I feel about the idea of an I-function. In many ways I feel I need more time to think about and discuss such an idea, since it seems mind-boggling and frustrating all at the same time. I think I always had attributed consistency with the nervous system. There was one way the nervous system did something and there were maybe one or two ways that the nervous system compensated if the ideal process wasn’t available. That isn’t the story anymore! There are multiple ways to do the same thing, many of which we can’t even predict. The nervous system lacks the consistency I thought it had. I think this is more surprising that disappointing. I feel like this semester the more I started to learn about the nervous system the more I realized how little we know. There are so many ‘why’s’ and ‘what if’s’ in the nervous system and I don’t even know that we have brushed the surface. I certainly don’t think it is as easy to map out a behavior, or certainly not as simple as I thought before.

In the last class we attempted to discuss free will. I don’t know that it came together for me as much as I wanted. I think I still feel very challenging about free will and how the nervous system has affected (or maybe even compromised) free will in the romanticized sense. It’s difficult to visualize free will through a filtered reality, and now I am attempting to figure out what that means. Brain and behavior are very closely linked and I am less sure about the whole of implications which result from that.