Neuroscience

Any anons here in the neuroscience field? How is it? What's the work like? What's your degree?

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You could dissect bee brains, train cannibalistic slugs, simulate neural circuits on super computers, etc.

Neuroscience is a amazingly interesting field.

Neurobio major psych minor
4 years of bench research in pain and itch sensation was fun. Doing clinical research on kids with right hemiparetic cerebral palsy with normal language. The kicker is that if you fuck up someone's left hemisphere in adulthood, they lose significant language ability. But these kids with fucked left brains have been able to reorganize their cortex to accomidate eloquent structures from literally masses of neurons with ambiguous function. The brains remold themselves dramatically.

Tldr, no matter what the study, neuro is fucking fascinating.

The science is interesting, but messy. As someone who looks at MRI scans, the same parts of the brain seems to be implicated somewhat in every cognitive process (and there are usually not enough people in a cohort to be sure about your findings, so different cohorts can give different results). It's very hard to point to activation areas and say "based on this, such and such is happening", and to get to that point we're going to need more sophisticated analysis methods like deep learning, and bigger cohorts.

I do ethanol reward, ingestive behavior and metabolism. I love the mix of surgery and hanging out with animals.

I majored in psych as an undergrad. We did not have a neuroscience major and the neuroscientist I wanted to work with was in the psych dept.

No, that is a problem with the resolution of the MRI. Honestly, you sound like a computer scientist, not a neuroscientist. Neuroscientists have more interesting techniques than just the MRI, and everyone knows the MRI gives trashy results.

See where I am going with this? Why would you base your research, in which you were trying to understand high resolution processes, with a low resolution machine? Unless, you did not understand the machine and just wanted easy numbers for algorithms.

I have seen several CS students make these naive assumptions but haven't met a neuroscientist that would be that dumb.

He sounds like a medfag.

Brain imaging research is boring as fuck anyways

Really depends on the field dude. Lots of neuroscientists have to use fmri if working on people. It does have lots of cons though pros too. And fmri is the highest spatial resolution we can use on people non-invasively. And i think he isnt talking about resolution but pointing toward the fact that neuroscience is increasingly moved away from emphasis on localization. Hes right. Higher areas i.e. parietal, prefrontal, cingulate are differentially active and implicated in so many tasks that its hard to have more than a vague conceptualisation of what ia happening in these areas.

>The science is interesting, but messy.

He called an entire field messy because he stupidly was expecting different results.

It's like banging your head against a brick wall, acting surprised that nothing happened, and then blaming the wall.

if large differences are not noticeable and you have to blame resolution then there is no difference and you are practicing bad science

Or you are stupidly using a screw driver to hammer away at a nail.

Neuroscience does not equal fmri. That's only what dumb, naive computer scientists think because they haven't bothered to learn anything about the field.

Here, just to try to steer the conversation away from too much negativity, this is what a competent computer scientist might do with fmri data,

youtube.com/watch?v=QbTf2nE3Lbw

Tom Mitchell worked with a neuroscientist and did enough research to understand the pros/cons of using the tool called fmri.

>The science is interesting, but messy.

This is 100% accurate, tho

So sorry... There's also EEG, PET, CT, SPECT, and slicing shit open, and they're all terrible ways of understanding how the brain works.
Borrowing your analogy, they're all screw drivers with different bit sizes.

Computer scientists also work on other interesting things like computational neurogenetic modelling. A shame that trying to introduce a bit of maths triggers the neuroscientists so much.

Fuck off.

Veeky Forums is such a circle jerk at times.

INTJ, CS, California, undergrad, depressed autist master race reporting in! Let me jack you off fellow INTJ, CS, California, undergrad, depressed autist.

Hnngggg...

Neuroscience is messy. What part of that statement is controversial? Is it the negative connotations of the word 'messy'? I didn't say it wasn't worthwhile. Please be an INTJ, CS, California, undergrad, depressed autist somewhere else.

What's an example of a theory in neuroscience? What does a hypothesis in neuroscience look like?

>is this receptor expressed in X nucleus
>are these receptors colocalized in X nucleus
>where does X-type neuron project to and receive projections from
>if I administer a ligand for receptor X in nucleus Y, how does it effect their behavior?
>does X behavior (let's say obesity or a specific drug addiction) alter Y peptide synthesis or Z receptor expression in K nucleus or J cell type

As far as theories go, it's mostly bickering between different models of addiction, obesity, diabetes etc... (I'm a behavioral neuroscientist) that barely differ but everyone postures because everyone wants more grant money from the tits of the NIH.

Sounds like most of the people in this thread are on the cognitive and imaging aide of things so I dont know about that.

Oh I guess you could call things like reward circuit theory (e.g. these sets of nuclei have these neurons which have these receptors which project to each other in this way and tend to play a role in either the the learning of a reward, motivation to acquire it, motivation to self administer, motivation to pathologically self administer etc...

There's also smaller scale bickering
>X peptide is anxiogenic in this nucleus as we have demonstrated
>no we demonstrated its anxiolytic
>we demonstrated its anxiogenic unless rats have food access before behavioral testing, then it will be anxiolytic

Actual example from a lab I was in. We were thw anxiogenic guys.

Not talking about resolution.

Depends on how u use them.

That's cool, thanks. Yes, I was thinking in terms of cognitive neuroscience like with respect to language, and from my experience with it in a couple classes that aspect of neuroscience does seem to be kind of silly. I don't know all that much about it but that's the impression I have after taking courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. What you're describing sounds like a more realistic approach to studying the brain.

It is silly for the most part. I'm not a big fan of cog neuro or cog psych, but I remember on the neuro side of things visual object recognition research being pretty well done.

That's Marr's work right? I've met neuroscientists who praise Marr and then do exactly what he said was pointless and unscientific.

>Honestly, you sound like a computer scientist, not a neuroscientist.

These fields are merging, user.

>These fields are merging, user.

Well, then CS students should start cracking open some biology books instead of being so lazy and egotistical, unless they want to make dumb mistakes.

Don't remember, read about it as an undergrad.

Only if you promise to learn some maths and avoid low blood sugar, ok?

so i got into an accident about a year ago that left the right side of my face weak and also hemifacial spasms. is there any hope for me in the near future neuroanons?

Probably not. I mean people sometimes do invasive surgery for epilepsy. And a neurologist friend of mine once told me you'd be surprised how much brain you can remove without affecting anything noticeably.

But it sounds like your problem isn't serious enough for doctors to justify the risks. Maybe by the time you die. But even then I think it's highly unlikely.

Neuroscience has been the single most useless field in all of science.

IS COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE ANY COOL?

Can any neuroscientist here tell me how memories work?

That's because it's pretty new, and in science things take a long time to be useful.
Also
>knowledge of how depression and othet mental illnesses work, leading to development of medicines and better treatments
>useless

Dunno, I worked in one before and thought it was boring, but we were modeling auditory perception using experimental data from ferrets since they have a close auditory system to humans. This was many years ago as an undergrad though so I don't remember much.

But on the subject of computational stuff and memory, there's cool work with planaria regeneration. You can condition a planaria, cut it's head off (it has a central brain) so that it regenerates into two and it will retain conditioning. I know there's a good bit of computational research as well in trying to elucidate the mechanisms of regeneration.

The point of the planaria example was to point out that current models of memory are an antiquated meme from cog psych. I wouldn't read into them too much.

I find locomotive memory fascinating though.

Both new planaria will retain conditioning, forgot to make that clear.

>computational research as well in trying to elucidate the mechanisms of regeneration.
This is what I need to do.

There are new models if u look at research not more than 20 years old

Theres some good fmri work if u look hard enough. Its going to become revalidates with new analysis methods and informational theories because no other methods can really look at networks relations. Population work gna be bihgwr too.

I don't do memory so I just remember what I read as an undergrad. I've seen papers as recently at 2016 cite baddeley & hitch, though they were criticisms.

Also just realized the only colleague I have who does memory work is the cog psychologist in my dept whose set to retire any day now.

I guess that's why my thoughts are 20 years old.