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Neuroscience Advice

John Hasenkam johnh at faraway.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk
Tue Aug 3 22:01:48 EST 2004


"Sina Tootoonian" <achillesofpersis at hotmail.com> 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

I taught myself neuroscience or least taught myself enough to pass off as
one on ngs. There is no end to the learning at both the basic and advanced
levels. It just keeps going on forever. I don't care anymore, I don't want
to read anymore, I keep my eyes on the screen, but I don't see anymore. The
former state is what will happen to you if try to get grounded in some
basics. The information will lack sufficient relevance to your particular
intellectual queries and as such learning and remembering will be very
difficult.

Choose an area of interest and read something about it. Review articles are
good starting points and perhaps you can use these to pique your interest
and just follow that. Trust me, if you're interested in neuroscience you can
play that game all your life. Good way to learn because its more fun but
very frustrating at first because so much is hard to understand. So always
have a list of things to memorise or follow up but be selective, add to the
list as you read. There are some reasonable online reference sources that
you'll find handy down the track(eg. cytokines on the web, cell biology
dictionaries). Reminds me, you definitely should bookmark this site:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Books

Excellent set of reference material, on-line and free. Learning the
background as required is frustrating and can be dangerous but we learn
better then. Sometimes we have no choice.

Also: Principles of Neuroscience by Kandel et al. Buy it.

--
John Hasenkam
"Instead, religious ideas often deal with unexplained and unexplainable
things and events - miracles, for instance. Ineffability and
mysteriousness - the inapplicability of scientific canons of explanation -
is what makes religious experiences religious in the first place.
...Cognitivism may, from such a standpoint, amount to little more than a
conflation of religion and science."

Sami Pihlström & Heikki J. Koskinen
Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki





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