Neurobiology and Behavior, Reflections

I am pleased now to have created a box in my brain.  I stored what I have learned in this course.  I will always leave a room for more summary of observations that would explain brain=behavior throughout my life.

We think every moment.  Onto many streams of thoughts that I constantly have carried along in my brain for the past 20 years, I added one more topic, that is, neurobiology and behavior.  This topic can stand on its own as one independent topic in my brain because it's so fascinating.  I am going to keep thinking about it constantly for the rest of my life, making new summary of observations.  While doing that, I will be reminded of the dear classmates, interesting activities we did during class like blind spot and three doors, and Professor Grobstein asking us an open-ended question. 

I first found this course stressful and intimidating because I was not a native speaker of English and I could not express myself fully in class.  But writing webpapers based on the topics I am interested in and searching for articles that revolve around those topics, I was able to express myself fully based on my cultural backgrounds and my brain. As time went, I became more engaged. 

 I agree with Emily Dickinson's suggestion that the brain contains the sky ... and you as well. The organ that constitutes 2% in weight of our body creates a person's world and a sense of one's identity too suggesting stories that fits in one's belief.    

The three questions I posted at the beginning of the semester were as follows:

I liked the metaphors we used in these class because although they are very broad they make the brain make sense, and they make sense. While I leave this class with about as limited a knowledge on the anatomy of the brain and the functions of its various regions, I am affirmed by a realization that learning everything there is to know about the brain would not give me a much better understanding of how it works. Thinking about the brain as a storyteller actually does make a big, potentially revolutionary hypothesis about the brain. It makes the assumption that ultimately everything we do, and therefore everything the brain does, operates in the same process, by filling in the space between the edges and telling a story. This seems to take us a lot further than an exploration of what each part is purported to do. 

While I liked the storyteller metaphor and the way it led us to an understanding of the brain as an dynamic system and a constant construction, I wanted to apply this to more examples. I wish that this concept had been introduced earlier in the course as our lens as opposed to be presented as the course's conclusion. 

I came into the course wanting to know more about the relationship between our body and our sense of self, and I began to explore this in my web paper about conjoined twinning. I am still very interested in this idea that we should reevaluate thinking of ourselves as a fixed boundary. We are much more adaptable. Throughout everyone's life their body changes and they adapt with it, and throughout everyone's life their sense of self changes and they adpat with it. 

I would have liked to go deeper, though, into the relationship between memory and this dynamic sense of self. We are unaware of so many of our adaptations, and our sense of self is a filling in of details. We remember, evolutionarily speaking, to survive, not to be self-reflective. So then, why are we self-reflective? Is it just a fluke, a side effect of an evolved memory function? 

I have really enjoyed the chance to hash out new questions as they arise, and to discover the internal conflicts that I have in approaching neurobiology and behavior. While I have tended to think of the class topics from very physiological and psychological perspectives, this class has allowed me the chance to attempt to  incorporate some of the less scientifically-based conversations we have had in class into my story-teller's comprehensive view on neuroscience.

I especially enjoyed our discussion of reafferent loops, especially in thinking about them behaviorally, rather than simply chemically and physiologically. I wish we had gotten into psychological phenomena like the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which I find fascinating. I think it would have been exciting to talk about that in the context of implicit memory, and non-I-function behaviors.

Thanks to everyone for rich discussion and a great semester!

At the beginning of the semester I wanted to explore these three topics:

(1)    What have studies shown about a possible association between artificial sweeteners and cancer?
(2)    How was phrenology used to determine an individual's psychological attributes?
(3)    What research methods are used to understand the human brain?

I have three new questions:

(1)    When is it right to alter a hyperactive child’s behavior with ADD and ADHD medications?
(2)    Is the overmedication of children used as compensation for poor parenting? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/06/AR2006100601391.html)
(3)    The individual is a product of both genes and culture. Does the ratio between these factors drastically vary among people?

Before Neurobiology and Behavior I compartmentalized neuronal function within the nervous system, and disregarded the role of culture in behavior. During the course, I began to rationalize the brain as a story, and the I-function as the storyteller.  My recent questions reflect this new perspective. ADD/ADHD, overmedication of children, and the transformation of the individual are multifaceted subjects influenced by both genes and culture. If a person is always a storyteller then I believe that Dickinson’s conclusion, that the brain contains the sky, may be a reasonable statement. Although I was aware that my opinions of neurobiology and behavior would change as the semester progressed, I never thought that in the end I would consider Dickinson’s poetry as scientific. This non-traditional course was beneficial since we discussed the brain as a “story.”

One concept that has interested me throughout the course is the relationship between internal and external hierarchy. We've talked about the nervous system being distributed, not dependent on any leader but the synchronization and coordination of multiple parts. On the other hand, it seems that we constantly create external hierarchies- in corporations, schools, government, and even families. An the other hand, the best "hierarchies" are also distributed systems- for example, a democracy rather than a dictatorship. Still, why is our brain so focused on hierarchy? In addition, yesterday we discussed the fact that hierarchy is inherent to culture which involves selectively assigning meaning, and so hierarchy may, in fact, be inevitable in our external worlds. How does our brain, which lacks hierarchy, accept this? Is external hierarchy created to satisfy the lack of internal hierarchy? Do individuals need to feel as though they have a place within hierarchy- is that how one comes to know thy self?

Also, I wonder if there might be some heirarchy between the congitive unconscious and the storyteller. It seems that the omnipresence and obscurity of the cognitive unconscious gives it a kind of power- it's beyond our control and understanding.