Reply to comment

As we complete our final semester I look back on this senior seminar as one of the most unusual and intriguing if not most educational classes I have taken.  While the individual topics certainly increased my experience in certain neuroscience topics I feel that it was the manner in which these topics were approached that was truly important.  Before delving into the ways my views have changed I first have to address the instructor, Paul.  While I appreciate the collaborative nature of the seminar, at the end of the day this was a class with a professor, and while Paul went to lengths to keep his personal opinions ambiguous (usually in order to foster further debate) his impact on the class cannot be discounted. 

                Firstly I recognize that the way the course was formatted was a conscious decision of Paul’s.  Besides the first topics which he selected the rest of the subjects were selected by students with almost complete freedom.  Thus I am confident that Paul true lessons were not based in a particular area of research but were instead the methods by which we evaluate a controversy or potentially important research.  In this regard I feel like this class has been very helpful.  We approached articles in a way I have never done before.  With a heightened suspicion of the author’s motives, methods and most importantly any potential conclusions that they make.  While the New York Time’s articles were an extreme example of this I have been surprised just how much creative license researches are permitted to take in connecting concepts with only scant evidence. 

                To me, the most beneficial part of the class was our attempt to view neuroscience in terms of its place in a subjective, religious and non-scientific word.  Viewed from within, neuroscience seems like a broad and sometimes unrelated field; however seeing how others use our findings (or erroneous popular impressions of our findings) to further their own agenda was both intriguing and unnerving.    Neuroscience attempts to fill one of the most philosophically troubling voids in our understanding of ourselves; the connection between what we are physically and who we are mentally.  This class’s greatest strength is that unlike traditional neuroscience courses that seek to fill this gap; we instead examined the void itself. 

Areas for further study:

Diffusion Tensor Imaging; we finally have a way to explore connectivity rather than activity.  fMRI has been a blessing in terms of its popular appeal and a curse in terms of its actual utility in answering neuroscience questions.  We are ready for imaging that can actually improve our understanding of brain interactions and hopefully avoids some of the processing folly that allows a dead salmon to have significant findings

Neuroscience as a life philosophy: Crazy stroke lady tried to use neuroscience in this manner.  While her connections were based on antiquated, now defunct, findings the use of neuroscience to moderate life views is very interesting.  We, as scientists, tend to be very uncomfortable with the application of findings to create pseudo-religious criterion to “improve our lives” but we must take care not to dismiss the desire of popular society for exactly that.  We cannot allow this field to wander so far from applicability that it takes a NYT’s reporters lack of understanding to be our only foray into pop-culture. 

Astrocytes:  (sorry couldn’t resist).  When 90% of our brains are 0% of an introductory neuroscience class something is missing from our picture.