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Throughout this semester, the one issue that we returned to over and over again was the issue of a shared subjectivity.  How can we know what another person is experiencing, if he is experiencing the same thing as we are, and how his brain is interpreting whatever it is that he is experiencing?  We have to assume that we are all having the same experience in order to create a functional society and world in which we can all live with one another.  We brought up the idea of a shared subjectivity in most of our class discussions, although I think the idea was especially interesting in our discussion of love and whether or not we could ever tell someone that they were not in love.  Another important topic for our group seemed to be the struggle to classify certain conditions that we consider psychological disorders, such as depression, schizophrenia, and other disorders that are considered perfectly normal in other cultures.  Are these states of being actually disorders or do we simply see them that way because they do not fit in with our shared subjectivity of what is "normal"?  Our explorations of what made good science and how technology helps our hinders our understanding of the brain were also thought-provoking.  Can we really make conclusions based on what we see on an image from an MRI machine?  Do we hold certain beliefs just because it is more profitable to explore those areas of science, leaving the "truth" unexplored and unknown?  Can we really ever say that we have found the truth, the right answer, and stop our explorations?
Beyond these questions, three major areas of neuroscience that should be explored are the following:
1. What is intelligence?  Is this another term that cannot be defined without creating a list of qualities that add up to intelligence, like we tried to do with love, or is there a specific definition of the term?  What makes the brain of a person that we deem "intelligent" different from the brain of a person who is not intelligent?
2. Does consciousness come from the connections of neurons that we have?  We learned about a group of researchers who examined consciousness by examining the number of connections in a brain, but computers have at least as many connections as our brain does; the internet has many more connections than out brains.  Will we ever be able to build a brain and call it conscious, or is there something special about the organization of our biology that gives us consciousness outside of the structure of the brains?
3. Is there a limited amount of "brain space"?  What determines the amount that a person can hold in their mind and remember?  Can molecules like PKMzeta increase the amount of brain space that a person has to work with, and if these molecules can increase memory, what are they really doing?  What neurons or brain areas are they affecting, and are there any abilities lost in the gain of memory for these molecules?