Bio 202, Getting Started

Hi there! My name is Emily Ambash and I am a Bryn Mawr senior majoring in theater and English. I am taking this course primarily because I'm a curious, skeptical person and can't help questioning, probing, and analyzing everything I experience and observe. Moreover, since I always enjoy participating in ongoing conversations, the forum aspect of the course really appeals to me.

The course topic (or arena) intrigues me because of the blurry, confused dichotomy it sets up between the brain and behavior. Both as a student and as a person, I'm drawn to lines and distinctions and to the idea of expanding or collapsing them. How much about our lives is relative, individual, cultural? How much is preprogrammed, environmental, moldable, still growing? These questions constantly affect me -- as a poet, as an actor, as a friend, as a sister, as a young adult. In every field and forest, from philosophy to New Hampshire, I can't help wondering how to balance or combine, wanting to study the area between categories and catastrophes, between experiences and our explications of them.

I don't find this area of inquiry exciting only intellectually; it also affects me personally. The shaky line between biology and behavior has always affected me. I have an older sister who is profoundly disabled, neurologically and physically, and a family that is, as a consequence, more skeptical of pat answers and easy systems. I'm extremely sensitive to terms like "retarded" and constantly seek to educate myself and others, to connect ideas to other ideas, to try to take interpersonal experiences and find in them bigger questions or problems. In many ways, I think my attitude as a learner is one of defiance and determination: I won't settle for superficial observations and I think I need the process of searching, finding, explaining, and complicating. As a person, similarly, I never let things be and always look way too deeply at both details and big ideas. I need to be trying to fit puzzle pieces together, but I never expect to accept that they really do.

I've encountered many of the ideas in this course, in some cases skirting them and in others delving deeply into them, but I haven't necessarily looked at this whole shebang self-consciously, interactively, or simultaneously. Some of the subjects have already been crucial to my personal and intellectual life (mental illness, insomnia, learning theory, autism, stem cell research, genes, pharmacology, stress and stressors, caffeine, relativism, little and bigger worlds, Venn diagrams, decision-making, depression, behavior and its obstacles); other topics I haven't yet thought about but am eager to consider. I think this course coincides well with my academic interests and, well, behaviors. I tend to ask too many questions, to ramble on, to attach myself intensely to ideas. I love when intellectual and personal exploration and discovery become interactive activities -- in fact, I think that interaction is essential! As much as experiences and explanations add to our lives individually, what I find most satisfying about research and discovery is the way that each of us adds layers to a larger spring or springboard that we share.