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Final Thoughts:

This semester I was enrolled in both this senior seminar class and psychopharmacology. Experiencing these two classes together has proven very interesting due to their markedly different approaches to science. Specifically, in psychopharmacology we would discuss disease from a reductionist point of view in which concepts such as receptor regulation were considered to be the full explanation/cause/therapy for a given neurological disorder. And although I actually really liked learning about the biology involved in drug-therapy, I very often found myself thinking during psychopharmacology, will the human brain ever completely understand its own behavior? It is probably this idea/theme that has resonated most with me in senior seminar. The increasingly reductionist philosophy embraced by most current neuroscientists assumes not only that the brain is responsible for all behavioral output, but that all behavioral output can be understood through analyzing the brain. At some level, I believe neuroscientists will stop being able to reduce the brain into its various components. I do not think that a structure/function or even a receptor regulation argument will ever be able to fully explain individual variation that exists within the brain. Individual variation is one of the only explanations for why the same drug does not always produce the same effect in two individuals with the same neurological symptoms.   I learned about the theme of shared subjectivity in a separate class with Paul and so while that idea continues to resonate with me, it isn’t new. I would say that the other major thought that I will come away with from this class is the NEED to figure out how to better communicate science to the rest of the world. I grew up in the Midwest with a huge extended family. My mom’s family grew up on a farm and she was the only one of her sisters (6) to go to college. This last summer, my aunt Eileen was diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer and passed away. The whole experience was very hard for our family. However, while I took may things away from that experience, I will never be able to forget watching two work obsessed insensitive doctors rush to explain my aunt’s cancer (the reason why she was dying) to a crowd of women (the aunts) who clearly had NO idea what was going on.   We have made science so inaccessible that even when people WANT to understand it, those who have the knowledge are so overwhelmed by responsibility that they can barely explain it themselves.

My Three Questions/areas of further research:        

1)   Depression/Anxiety. What disorders exist within the umbrella term depression? and how to explain placebo effects on mildly depressed patients.

2)   Conciousness

3)   Neuroplasticity and new treatments for brain and spinal cord injury.