Why is neuronscience so unpopular...

I lol'd

I'm assuming everyone starts with the action potential. They teach it in high school biology.

My neuroscience module started off with the CNS and PNS, neurons, action potentials, junctions, neurotransmitters etc....

nueroscience is just computer science that doesn't understand the computer it's analyzing yet. In a few years it'll simply be a branch of computer science, to Veeky Forums's dismay.

Dualists btfo

Wasn't taught in my HS biology, as far as I recall.

It was Mendelian Ratios, Mitochondria Is The Powerhouse Of The Cell, and, I dunno. Some other stuff.

Because they don't want to be reminded of being brainlets.

i literally learnt the nervous system in 10th grade.
it was hell at the beginning.
i thought i'd understood it at some point. then my teacher gave me a question in a test (something like the pathway for voluntary control of deglutition) and i felt like a total brainlet.
took some time till i fully understood it.
i thought that the nervous system was the worst part about biology. untill i got to the glands.
now as a med student i really miss those times.

Gotta get in on that synthetic neurobiology/neuropharmacology goldrush

This is what I hope to accomplish, or atleast help to accomplish. I've been thinking about this since the age of 15. If we have technological "codes", the world around us must also have a biological "code", especially our neural network. My goal in life is to help accomplishing the task of "mapping" the entire human brain and all of the neural networks and all of their functions, aswell as deciffering this biological code.

I imagine a future where everyone can at all times control exactly how they feel, how motivated they are, aswell as possible mechanical, or technological implants to the brain with the aim to aid with brain damage. Super strength at all times perhaps (All though that sounds at this time, dangerous for the hunman body, and especially the society we live in, but still an interesting concept)

Mapping out the entire human brain? You want to be mapping out billions of neurons mate?

>now as a med student i really miss those times.

I don't know, currently I'm doing my Clinical 1 Internal Med clerkship, and yes it's drinking from a firehose, sheer volume is completely overwhelming, having to worry about management is a new type of stress for me and especially cardiology and Hem / Onc kicks my ass but I don't miss basic sciences at all. Neuroanatomy lectures are still one of the more uncomfortable (Interesting but difficult) memories with tons of shitty nuclei, clinically insignificant obscure branches of peripheral nerves and pathways still haunt me.

>neuronscience
this is actually a most awesome word

>Neuroanatomy lectures are still one of the more uncomfortable (Interesting but difficult) memories with tons of shitty nuclei, clinically insignificant obscure branches of peripheral nerves and pathways still haunt me.

I may have vomited words due to PTSD flashback mid sentence

I'd want to work with alternative ways to make this a possible reality, yes. There must be ways to make this goal possible, perhaps the technology is not compleetly there yet, but I will strive to make it a reality.

because its grouped with psychology.

My school offers various classes but they are all in the Psychological Sciences. So you major in psychology with the emphasis in Neuro. Most people pair it with chemistry or biology minor.

I'd imagine psychology majors, Chemestry majors, neuro science majors and Computer science/ Coder majors (Combined with chemestry and psychology studies) would make a pretty good team.

is this the final evolution of Veeky Forums

If you are Norwegian you should have heard about the Mosers.

>Source?
>I know a lot of people
Why are you on this board?

It seems like a difficult thing to get into since it’s a syncretic discipline. It isn’t something you see promoted much at colleges. Who has ever heard of anyone studying or getting a degree in it? You’re only going to hear about it at certain places such as Berkeley, I imagine.

Remove psychology and anthropology.
Half of philosophy is junk, and the other half can be merged with linguistics and/or education. Neuroscience and AI can be merged. Also, you forgot mathematics.

Brainlet, learn about reading comprehension.
Read the first lines again.

Nothing you've written changes the fact you're basing a belief in a subject's lack of popularity on retarded anecdotal shit like the opinions of people you know and how many news stories you think you've personally noticed instead of a real statistic.

What I am trying to convey is that the popularity and the encouragement on a global scale is way too low. Sure you might know a lot of people going into neuroscience, but it is a field that should honestly be supported and encouraged on a global news scale.

>the popularity and the encouragement on a global scale is way too low
A conclusion which again, you're basing on anecdotal garbage.
Take the two seconds to look up actual numbers next time you retard.

>190
That's EXACTLY what I'm saying you goddamn autist. ITS TOO LOW. And what context is this taken from anyway, and does it cover a nation, or is it global.

My evidence about my statements is that, in Norway, I've never even heard of neuroscience, probably only once or twice in my life, and at extremely rare occations read about it on an international news paper/site.

Now, stop being an obstacle for science and get back to flipping burgers you absolute brainlet.

>Considerably more students completing the major than the average across all majors (5,818 vs. 389 graduates)
>Considerably more schools offering the major than the average across all majors (234 vs. 36 schools)
It's extremely popular by any actual metric, do some research before assuming bullshit next time idiot.

Still not high enough, but it's going in the right direction. Thanks for doing the research for me, dummy.

The less people doing it the more chances you have of fulfilling a niche that no one else is.

Every brain is unique. There is no one "code", this is already known. There are general areas, but there's nothing that's like "this strand of nuerons makes people think of cats" or anything like that.

You need to map every single persons brain independently if you want to get a future like what you want. It's incredibly difficult even with Artificial Intelligence.

doing mri scans and describing different areas with jargon names, hardly classifies as science

You don't need many people on Neuroscience, one ben Carson is enough

Well, why aren't you a neuroscientist then?

> Uni has honors Neuroscience for undergrad
> Only accepts 30 people each year
> To brainlet to get accepted

These programs only want the best of the best. They don't accept sub-par students, that's why the numbers are so low.

This is a cognitive science graph. So no.

Im studying to become one as we speak, how hypocritical do you think I am?

Of vourse there is a code underlying somewhere. Otherwise we wouldnt function. Its kind of like how DNA have a pre-set build in plants. The more water and the more sunlight, the more it can grow, and a dandelion for example grows in a very specific genetic way, which obviously require some pre-built code, how else would it know how to grow? Same woth the brain, if the code doesnt lie in our neurons, then it most definitely must lie in our DNA responsible for how our brain was supposed to grow into during our infancy.

Discovering the elements of the brain and how it works does

>i don't know anything about neuroscience

Neuroscience programs are targeted at bio majors. Neuroscience includes biophysics and math. Bio majors tend to be intimidated by physics and math.
Bio majors also tend to sneer at the psychological aspect of it.

I'm a Neuroscience major, ask me anything

Cognitive science is a middle schooler's meme degree. The only people that take this are those that are too intimidated by hard sciences, so they water it down with shit like linguistics, philosophy and anthropology

Getting a degree on a Russel Group uni atm

But I am user

And finally, this tbqh. One of my modules involves the biophysics of membranes, and everyone is whining about having to interpret the membrane as a circuit.

Most people that want to do neuro-like degrees are either studying CompSci for neuronal simulation or psychology because they only care about the "cool" aspects like behaviour, and not pharmacology or cell behaviour.

And what about someone who's 6 months away from an MD and wants to get into NS? Im interested in neurology, pharmacology, and would like to work in clinical trials mostly. Is the path clinical neurology --> investigation from within the hospital right?

OP here.

Tell me about neuroscience. How deep do you dig within the human brain? Cell level deep or atom level deep?

If you're going from an MD, your Neuroscience focus will probably be mostly pathological. Right now Neurodegeneration and Neuroinflammation are a pretty big deal, so that's definitely a viable path. Then again, I'm from the UK, so I don't know how much technique you can get from an MD.

Cell level, but that covers pretty much everything, since the atomic level is too small for cells. We use patch clamping, where you basically stick a voltage clamp into a cell to measure channel activation en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_clamp

Personally, I would say we dig really deep, but not deep enough to know what the "mind" is yet. We have EEGs to measure what's basically the brain's heartbeat, optogenetics to turn on and off channel in a lab and patch clamping.

I don't what exactly you wanna know about neuro, but basically, we do less than what movies think and more than what other scientists think. For example, we actually know with a lot of detail how images are processed, so much so we know which part of the brain serves for faces vs detecting movement.

Fascinating! How long did it take you to get an official education in Neuroscience?

what uni?

Neuroscience was a mistake on all fronts.

If your goal is to learn how to grow a brain, just cut out the strand of DNA that causes the brain to grow. But that doesn't give any insight into AI or how the brain actually WORKS, just how the brain is BUILT.
If you want to think of all the dendrites as little transistors and the entire brain is a computer made out of 10^14 transistors (dendrites) that's a closer way to start analyzing the brain as a computer, it's now it's currently done but it's INCREDIBLY difficult.

Half a point on both ends, bro.

Infact, I'd like to know both.

Both how to grow a brain, or atleast the process behind it. AND how to understand the brain. My hypothesis since like the age of 15 has been that the brain is somewhat similar to a computer, and with that fact, makes it moddable and configurable aswel, we just gotta learn how to do it properly. Which is this "Code" I'm reffering to, once we deciffer the genetical code, we will be gods among earth. Evolution for example, if we can change the part of the body that stores evolutionary traits/aspects, then we can basically "Code" the next generation of human beings into being whatever we would want feasable.

God, just discussing this topic makes me motivated. I fucking love science.

Because the brain sucks compared to what is theoretically possible. You also have better chances of understanding things better using ML/compsci than neuroscience. Only use is if you combine the two ala deepmind demis

>Because the brain sucks compared to what is theoretically possible.
It actually doesn't, though I had that same underlying assumption for some time.

It can only seem like that if you don't know very much about the brain, or the nature of computation in our universe. The types of computational machinery the universe supports, via its underlying logic.

The brain ain't so bad when it comes down to it.

>You also have better chances of understanding things better using ML/compsci than neuroscience.
True. Especially a deep understand of numerical methods.
>Only use is if you combine the two ala deepmind demis
Meme

Deep Learning is a meme. Our brain does in 5 layers what it takes a deep learning architecture 100 layers to do. The importance of highly specific interconnectivity and recurrent connections cannot be ignored.

Yeah ... you have no idea what you're on about, I study Psychology and Neuroscience, they are very much two different subjects.

Unpopular in what way?

I mean, climate science is unpopular, since there's such a large political movement against it.

Sanitation science is unpopular, for... Obvious reasons.

Neuroscience sounds daunting, so I could see where it would be an unpopular career choice, but I rarely, if ever, has anyone decried its existence as a field.

Even in media, a lot of sci-fi shows and NOVA type documentaries tend to center around neuroscience. Certainly saying, "I'm a neuroscientist", makes everyone think you're either a genius or a liar.

I mean, hell, that Vsauce jerk managed to get a show with that lie.

Its nevrovitenskap in norwegian you dumb fuck

nevro = neuro

nevron = neuron

do you study in england by any chance

>My evidence about my statements is that, in Norway, I've never even heard of neuroscience, probably only once or twice in my life, and at extremely rare occations read about it on an international news paper/site.
Another Norwegian here.

First off the Moser pair, winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine did put neuroscience on the news for a while. Secondly the Norwegian news and "intellectuals" and those determining what to discuss are anti technological. Just replacing a fuse will make them a nervous wreck that can only be cured by writing a book about this horrible experience. Do not expect Norwegian news to write much if anything about this. There is the depravity called forskning.no which really hammers this in where "science" is cast as drama (and mainly translated from a Danish source). The only exceptions are two of the blogs written by people who know what they are talking about (Wahl and Tandberg). The rest is garbage. A few of us added constructive criticism in the discussions but that was as welcome as the Plague and now the "discussion" is cleansed like under Pol Pot.

I stopped reading the garbage. try BBC World News instead, they refer to primary sourced by the DOI references.

Are you trying to tell us what the science of the brain is before we know the science of the brain? For all we know the full functioning of the human brain is beyond our ability to comprehend. Don't put the wagon before the horse.

The functioning of the human brain is quite possible beyond the ability of a single human to comprehend. That however also goes for a lot of science. Nevertheless it might be possible for humanity.

Also, if we understand more of the brain it is possible that we may learn faster and thus get to do original research much earlier than today. In order to do any headway you have to cover a lot of ground first and that takes a lot of time, and increasingly more time.

Ref. the knowledge event horizon.

>once we deciffer the genetical code, we will be gods among earth
>the part of the body that stores evolutionary traits/aspects
>I fucking love science.

Um...good luck then.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pushing neuroscience as far as possible, but but I don't think we should assume that we will ever be able to fully explain the nervous system. Take for example consciousness. We seem to be no where near being able to explain it, and no one seems to be able to give satisfactory answer for what types of systems we should even be looking for in the brain that would give rise to it. Maybe whatever it is that leads to consciousness it completely beyond the scope of human intelligence to hypothesize about, let alone experiment with, simply because of the way our brain understands things.

NTG, but I almost think consciousness is more of a linguistic conceptual problem than an empirical one. Given how easy it is to tinker with, by messing with the biology, seems it's a simply emergent system. With all the evidence towards that, we would never question it, in any other emergent system - we just rail against the idea because, well, it's us. (Granted, we also have a hard time just defining "consciousness".)

We have, for instance, thanks to rather simplistic neurological experiments, machines that can detect whether or not you intend to press a button, and can predict your intention with such preemption that they can stop you from doing so before you're even fully cognisant of the decision to press the button yourself. If you're going to continue to deny its simply an emergent system at that point, then you have a whole can of worms to explain.

I kinda suspect we'll have a non-real-time simulation of the human brain before we actually understand how it works though. This would open up the field of neurology to all sorts of experiments that would, otherwise, be rather unethical, if not impossible, and create a rapid cascade of discoveries in the field. Might even happen in my lifetime (almost certainly in someone else's here - I'm pretty old.)

Of course it's an emergent system. You'd have to be an idiot to argue anything else; almost all systems we study are. I don't think you know what emergent means. You can think whatever you want about what consciousness is, we still don't understand it and having hypotheses, no matter how convinced you are of them, won't help us actually understand it. In fact, becoming convinced of you hypothesis before the evidence is available will only work to prevent you understanding. The only way to figure it out for certain is through empiricism, there's no reason to believe any level of introspection can lead to any meaningful or useful insight. All it will lead to is personal experience.

How do you think we're going to simulate the human brain before we understand it, just by collecting data? We already have the entire neural system of the roundworm mapped, a comparatively simple system with only 102 neurons, we still don't understand it's behavior. We have to understand the system to know what information is needed for the simulation.

Who will deciffer the genetical code? WHO WILL DO IT???

>Who will deciffer the genetical code? WHO WILL DO IT???
>deciffer
not you

>How do you think we're going to simulate the human brain before we understand it, just by collecting data? We already have the entire neural system of the roundworm mapped, a comparatively simple system with only 102 neurons, we still don't understand it's behavior. We have to understand the system to know what information is needed for the simulation.
What's left to understand about roundworm behavior?

Brain scanning techniques are getting increasingly sophisticated, and eventually we'll be able to get a snapshot of the whole thing in action, or, perhaps before then, get conglomerated snapshots of enough working pieces to get them to behave together. There's some efforts at just those sorts of things, and various successful attempts towards ambient networking of similar biological structures and networks, such as ant colonies, and Blue Brain, with its 10,000 neurons, and 10^8 synapses, which simulates a rat cortex column, and is currently being expanded upon.

It's entirely possible to assemble a virtual device so complex that you can't analyze its behavior directly - that's how Google works, after all. It's similarly possible to reproduce a system without understanding the totality of its function, which is done in reverse software engineering all the time.

Not saying it's going to be easy and not going to involve herculean efforts - but we managed to build the LHC to search for the innermost workings of the universe, surely some groups will come together to fund the search for the innermost workings of ourselves.

Last I checked, the NHGRI and the DOE already got together and did it, back in 2003.

I don't know enough about the topic of C .elegans to really comment further on what's left to discover, but I know that there are have still been papers coming out on the subject this year, which would lead me to believe it's still not fully understood.

Your examples of reverse engineering and complex systems miss my point. Those are systems created by humans or created by systems that were created by humans. But the human brain may be complex beyond a level that human intelligence can form questions about.

The type of intelligence and creativity we have that allows us to make advancements in physics, a largely reductive endeavor, may not be the kind we need in order to solve the problem of consciousness.

We might be able to image the entire brain, or we might not. Who knows how far we'll be able to go. I'm not trying to say we can't understand the brain, just that we shouldn't assume we will be able to. This all being said, I'm inclined to think that given enough time, we should eventually be able to do it. My point is just that we can't assume it as fact, even if everything in science so far points towards that idea that we will be able to. Who knows what kind of paradigm shift we might go through before we've figured it out.

>The type of intelligence and creativity we have that allows us to make advancements in physics, a largely reductive endeavor, may not be the kind we need in order to solve the problem of consciousness.
Well, figuring out how the brain works may not necessarily solve the problem of consciousness. Though, like I said in the first post, it maybe a conceptual problem we insist on having, rather than a physical one that can be solved externally. But, as far as the how the brain works, throw enough people at it, and eventually, barring a dark age or apocalypse, should happen. Unless...

>This all being said, I'm inclined to think that given enough time, we should eventually be able to do it. My point is just that we can't assume it as fact, even if everything in science so far points towards that idea that we will be able to.
...This turns into something that involves quantum mechanisms or some such, as there is a problem there are some things we're fundamentally prevented from knowing in totality by the very physical limits of the universe. I kinda doubt this is a problem with the human brain - there's more than enough atomic level stuff going on to explain behavior - but yeah, who knows, could run into a hitch we're physically barred from getting around.

If it doesn't solve the problem of consciousness then it hasn't figured out how the brain works.

It doesn't even necessarily have to be something quantum, there could be some other principle in the universe we haven't discovered yet. I'm doubtful, but you always have to keep the possibility open in order to be intellectually honest.

>If it doesn't solve the problem of consciousness then it hasn't figured out how the brain works.
Still wouldn't solve it if it's a conceptual problem. Granted, I'm sure even if that isn't the issue, it would be a long time after before it resolved it for certain people, if ever.

it is a mystery

>fugg

>and the DOE
Why would DOE have an interest in this??

>get an F in biology at school
>do psych at uni
>transfer to neuroscience., probably took the place from someone who did will in biology
Feels good

Because its mostly bio chemistry and somewhat related to medicine. I think off all STEM field hard chemistry is least popular. Now why is chemistry less popular than physics, from personal experience physics just make sense, also alot of progress was made because of tools and technology we have developed. And what is chemistry? Formulas and shit that make no sense.

How long until neuroscience leaves witch-doctor tier by being able to make accurate predictions on pharmacological effects without clinical trials?

Initially, effects of radiation on DNA.

I work for a company that does beep brain stimulation.

its interesting and theres a lot of electronic theory involved in the development and research end of things.

weird part is that anatomy on functions as a general rule whereas the physiology ie the specific rate of neurons firing is a better indicator of where you are. we dont even know exactly how dbs works.

lots of growth opps

*on =only