achillesofpersis at hotmail.com (Sina Tootoonian) wrote in message news:<b72135f.0407300840.463a304f at posting.google.com>...
> Hello all,
>> I am an undergrad electrical engineering student. I have been studying
> neuroscience in my spare time, and I was looking for some research
> advice:
>> I've been doing a literature review, and have had no trouble
> understanding the contents of the papers I've been reading. However,
> they have been review papers for the most part, and so their levels of
> sophistication have not been excessively high. My question is:
>> Should I stop the literature review and get a grounding in basic
> neuroscience first (Biology, Chemistry, General Neuroscience,
> Information Theory, Statistics), or continue with my review and learn
> the required background as the need arises?
>> Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
>> Cheers!
>> Sina
Biology, Chemistry, General Neuroscience, Information Theory AND
Statistics?!?
Good lord, if you get a grounding in all that stuff, you can probably
WRITE neuroscience textbooks instead of reading them. At the risk of
offending everybody reading this, I doubt whether very many
card-carrying neuroscientists (I'm one) have a sufficent grounding in
all those areas.
My advice is to concentrate your efforts on the things you find most
interesting, at the time you find them most interesting. If you have
no trouble reading reviews, you should probably pick out the reviews
of subjects that you thought were the coolest, go through the
references to find the key primary research papers, and read them
(reading the primary papers is absolutely essential). In the process,
you will probably come upon concepts or methods that you don't
understand or aren't familar with. At that time, you can delve into
those particular areas, following tangents into chemistry or info
theory or whatever, until you're satisfied (ideally, you'll never be
satisfied, but life is full of compromises).
Have fun (yes, it's supposed to be fun),
Matt