NBE-E4210 First thoughts

This blog post concerns the first two weeks of the course on structure and operation of the human brain. Before this course I hadn’t almost any knowledge of the subject. Just some basics of human anatomy and biology. I wish I knew more about chemistry, but luckily so far it seems that most things are explained in the course book pretty much from the ground up. My background of undergrad physics is not strictly that useful maybe, but it does provide some insight. Reading about the potentials of neurons, I can’t but help make analogies in my mind to computers. It is cool how robustly the body is capable of transferring information.

Reading about how the Tetrodotoxin works was interesting to me, because it feels like a pretty simple and clean solution on how to stop the working of a nervous system. I’ve enjoyed reading the course book by Bear et al. The text feels easy to read and explains details well. The history of neuroscience is interesting as well. I’ve recently been reading about the presocratics and they too had some ideas about the mind, some seemed clever to me especially considering the lack of tools they had back then. With neuroscience some pretty fundamental knowledge has been locked away due to lack of suitable tools for most of the humans have been interested in the workings of the brain.

I think learning the basics of neuroscience can help in gaining better understanding of everyday human life. Applying neuroscience might help identifying where ones environment or behavior could be changed to improve the quality of life.


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