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passive_fist comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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1) The idea of constructing things out of axioms. This is probably old hat to everyone here, but I was clumsily groping towards how to describe a bunch of philosophical intuitions I had, and then I was learning math proofs and understood that any "universe" can be described in terms of a set of statements, and suddenly I understood what finally lay at the end of every chain of why?s and had the words to talk about a bunch of philosophical ideas...not to mention finally understanding what math is, why it's not mysterious if physics is counterintuitive, and so on. (Previously I had thought of "axioms" as"assumptions", rather than building blocks.). Afterwards, I felt a little cheated, because it is a concept much simpler than algebra and it ought to have been taught in grade school.
2) Something more specialized: I managed to get a B.S. in neuroscience without knowing about the thalamus. I mean, knew the word and I knew approximately where it was and what it did, but I did not know that it was the hub for everything. (By which I mean, nearly every connection is either cortico-cortico or cortico-thalamic). After graduation, I was involved in a project where I had to map out the circuitry of the hippocampus, and suddenly... Oh! This is clearly one of the single most important organizational principles of the brain and I had no idea. After that, a whole bunch of other previously arbitrary facts gradually began to made sense...Why did no one simply show us a picture of a connectome before and point out that big spot right in the middle where it all converges?
3) We learned all this minutia of history, but no one really talked about the hunter-gatherer <--> agriculture transition and its causes. Suddenly, historical trends in religion, the demographic transition, nutrition, exercise, cultural differences, and a bunch of other things start clicking together.
I think what all these 3 things have in common, is that they really aught to have been among the very first lessons on their respective subjects...but somehow they were not.
About that, how would you evaluate the state of the typical undergrad neuroscience curriculum today and how relevant it is to modern knowledge about the organization and workings of the brain?
Hmm
I think the undergraduate curriculum is good enough to get the average college student up to a level where they are comfortable reading and understanding a scientific paper in biology even if they start out with only a very rudimentary knowledge of science coming in.
You spend the first 3 years kind of learning the basic fundamentals of biology, like how evolution and cells and hormones and neurons work, and I think for Lesswrong's demographic that sort of thing is general knowledge so most of y'all could skip it without any major issues. I found these courses challenging because of the amount of stuff to memorize, but I am not sure I found them useful. I kind of wish I could have replaced some of those introductory courses with work in computer science or a stronger biochem/chem foundation, because I already knew about evolution and mitochondria and that sort of thing.
The last 2 years, for me, were quite useful. In these upper level classes, professors in a given sub-specialty would select primary literature which was important to their field, and it would be discussed in depth. What you learn will largely depend on what the professor is passionate about. There are also classes where many different researchers come in and present their work, and one ends up picking up many little threads from that which can later be pursued at leisure. Despite already being comfortable with primary literature in neuroscience and psychology before joining these classes, I still found them very useful because of the specific content of the work I was exposed to. Many of these courses were technically graduate courses, but it is standard for undergraduates to attend them.
Overall, I think if you are generally comfortable reading scientiic papers in biology, bachelors-degree level neuroscience is not an extremely difficult subject for a motivated autodidact to acquire without formal coursework (assuming you have access to all the major scientific journals). The coursework is good - but there's no secret esoteric knowledge you can only acquire from the coursework. it's not necessarily better than self-study, but it's awesome when combined with self-study and is fairly decent even without any self-directed study.
Direct contact with researchers is definitely a very positive thing for keeping a pulse on stuff, knowing what is important to study and what isn't, and generally learning faster than you could on your own. You're also expected to join a lab during your undergrad, and you will inevitably learn a lot through that process.
TL:DR - As with many fields, if you want to be up to date on modern knowledge, there is absolutely no substitute for constantly skimming the new papers that come out. The undergraduate curriculum spends 2-3 years preparing you to successfully read a scientific paper in biology, and 1-2 years having you read papers which are selected to be particularly important in the field. Also, you will typically join a lab, which is certain to cause learning.