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Neurobiology and Behavior: A course and a conversation - 1997

Neurobiology and Behavior (Bryn Mawr College Biology 202, taught by Paul Grobstein, syllabus) is a lecture/discussion course aimed at involving students in an ongoing discussion of the prospects and problems of trying to understand behavior in terms of nervous system organization and function. It is a comprehensive treatment neither of research on the nervous system nor of that on behavior but rather a consideration of the relations between the two. As such, it is both appropriate for and attracts students with a variety of different backgrounds and future career plans. As part of the course, students prepare weekly short essays reacting to material of the course and suggesting open questions which require further exploration. Since these essays help both to characterize the current level of understandings of problems in which many people are interested, and to define needed new lines of inquiry, they are made available here.

Questions provided to students to stimulate their thinking are listed weekly below. These give a general idea of the topics of the essays for that week, though students are free to write about whatever they happened to have on their minds. Clicking on any question will take you to all of the essays contributed for that week. Essays from 1996 are also available.

• It was suggested in class that brain and behavior are the same thing, in the sense that all aspects of behavior and human experience correspond to activities of the brain. If you think this is so, describe what aspects of behavior and/or human experience you think would be most difficult to account for in these terms. If you doubt the suggestion, explain why.

• The nervous system has been characterized as an input/output box having autonomous properties which itself consists of interconnected input/output boxes themselves consisting of interconnected input/output boxes themselves consisting of ... with a very large number of neurons as the lowest level input/output boxes. Does this increase or decrease your comfortableness with the proposition that brain is behavior, and why?

• The behavior of humans following interruption of connections between the spinal cord and the brain (as sometimes occurs in the case of a "broken neck") both illustrates some important general principles and raises new questions about nervous system function and organization in relation to behavior. Discuss principles and/or questions.

• If one is interested in behavior, is it really worth spending a week trying to understand membrane potentials, the inner workings of the smallest boxes of the nervous system?

• How useful are the nervous system concepts "motor symphony" and "central pattern generation" for better understanding behavior?

• How useful is the nervous system concept "corollary discharge" for better understanding behavior?

• yet to be posted

• What general lessons about behavior come from thinking about the structure of the eye and about retinal processing?

• What insights into brain function and behavior emerge from exploring the neuronal organization underlying color vision?