hardcore neuro research

[supervenience]

---

Members do not see this ad.

i'm very interested in neuroscience research, especially areas relating to memory and perception at the biochemical/cellular level. my idealized life work is to narrow the dividing line between the mental and physical, and perhaps even coming up with a few unifying theory.

anyway, to make a long story short, i was wondering if one can tailor a medical degree and neurology residency training for neuroscience research. ideally i would like to have time for teaching and some clinical work, but my main interest is work leading to explanations for the relationship between the mind and the brain, through a multi-modal approach of neurology, neuroscience, and contemporary philosophy of mind. is this at all possible?

 

[TicDouloureux]

Have you thought about an MD/PhD program? You could do your graduate work in Neuroscience, maybe do some postdoc work during residency or do a research fellowship after neurology residency, and then try for an academic appointment. There is an MD/PhD section here at sdn.

 

[charcot]

Why not just get the PhD?
The MD will mean 4 years med school and 4 years residency, the goal of which will be to produce someone who can take care of patients with neurological diseases. The expertise developed here has little to do with understanding/generating the theoretical basis of perception/cognition/volition. you will learn to generate differential diagnosis based on a superb neurological exam in conjunction with using tests such as lp, MRI, PET, CT with contrast and EEG/EMG. Plus, when you finish training you will have been out of the "hard-core" research environment needed to perform experiments to frame your experimental questions for at least 8 years and have loans to pay back for your education which may have you take a more lucrative job instead of the lesser paying research position you are truly interested in.

The MD/PhD path is tailored towards translational reasearch, as exemplified by the NIH MSTP funded programs. They are designed to produce clinician scientists to do molecular reearch to understand diseases come up with ways to better diagnose and treat such disease.

Instead you should think about doing a PhD with a top notch advisor such as Eric Kandel, Michael Gazzaniga, Christof Koch, Francis Crick etc then secure a post-doc that incorporates a nitch for yourself that will allow you to get lots of grants. Then you can publish like mad, build a large lab, and then pursue your lifelong dream of solving the mind-brain puzzle.

Good Luck.

 

[Mediculous]

You should probably scratch Crick off that list, unless you plan on going to the Big Lab in the Sky 🙁

 

[stwei]

Anyone here who knows what type of neuroscience research is done at the systems level? How sufficient are AI models in explaining neural integration and propagation?

 

[Spacedman]

Anyone here who knows what type of neuroscience research is done at the systems level? How sufficient are AI models in explaining neural integration and propagation?

"systems" is pretty broad, but usually deals with the scale between cellular neurophys and cognitive neurosci, such as event-related potentials, fMRI, PET/SPECT, multiunit electrophys recording &c&c. AI models aren't so well developed-- the better network modelling (Traub, Koch & Laurent, JJ Hopfield) can propose computational mechanisms that kinda echo something that looks like behavior. switch around a few parameters in some of these models, and you can produce any kind of "behavior" you're looking for, though. not super helpful.