My Discipline

I am currently studying (pre-)Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. Essentially, Neuroscience is the study of the brain, its components, and how it works. My personal interests in my discipline fall under the desire to learn about and do research on the human brain, specifically.

"Outer Surface of the Human Brain" 1894-1895 via Wikipedia Commons, public domain

Students in my field of interest learn many different things depending on their specific focus in Neuroscience. For the most part, though, students learn how processes in the brain work, the anatomy of the brain, and what the brain's functions are. Students learn to fully understand how the brain affects the body and how the complexity of the brain can unfold.

Most Neuroscience majors go on to graduate studies to get a Doctorate, or at the very least, a Masters degree. Beyond higher education, people in my area of study usually work in labs doing research on the brain, or apply their knowledge to other fields such as robotics or medicine, creating new technologies.

I was drawn to this field by the mystery of the human brain. Before I had decided I was interested in Neuroscience, science had not interested me at all. Chemistry, Biology, and Physics were boring fields to me for the most part, so when I found Neuroscience, it almost did not seem like a field of science at all to me, despite all that it entails. I think this is because there is so much to learn about the brain, and the information learned is not as cut-and-dry as fields like Physics. I also find neuroscience to be one of the most important of the sciences, since the brain is most of what the existence of life is centered around.

Just a few of the most exciting discoveries in Neuroscience right now come from Van Wedeen, who discovered the brain's "wiring patterns" as a "multi-layered grid in 2012, and Professor Jack Gallant from UC Berkeley, who helped to combine the visual cortex and technology to be able to view the images that people see in their heads in 2011.

The top scholarly journals in Neuroscience include "Neuroimage", published in the U.S. by Academic Press Inc., "Nature Reviews Neuroscience", published in the U.K. by Nature Publishing Group, and "Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders", published in the U.K.