What is the Secret to Neuro?

[rubyness]

Can anyone help me--I am afraid I cannot make heads or tails of neuro. In particular, it's motor systems that's troubling me. I think the way it was presented to us was a mess, and I am wading my way through class notes, transcripts, Kandel and Purves. It's vaguely coming together, but I still feel like it's all over the place. We are starting auditory, visual, olfactory and taste this week so I really need to get a handle on motor before I move on to the next stuff.

An suggestions for organizing this material?? Thanks in advance.

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[SocialistMD]

What, exactly, is giving you trouble with motor? Revealing this will better enable us to help.

 

[Starflyr]

My suggestion would be to get the Neuroanatomy Coloring Book. Its not great for memorizing, but it has good explanations and good visuals. Also buy a box of 96+ crayons, cause some pictures have that many bits to color. Seeing it and coloring it definitely helped me. It took longer than rote memorization, but I finaly kicked butt on the final, and I actually KNOW it now, its not fleeing my brain like something memorized would (C on midterm, A on final). I hope this helps some?

Star

 

[rubyness]

Thanks, I guess what's giving me the most trouble is that I have lots of bits and pieces of info and no hierarchy to put them in to. I guess it's the old "too much onformation--don't know what's important here" med school phenomenon. There's a lot of random facts all thrown in there. I just need to structure some kind of framework.

Now that I'm saying all this, I think it's just something I'll have to figure out on my own. I can't give very concrete descriptions of the problem. Well, thanks for trying!

 

[Medigirl]

I found it helpful to draw out the pathways like a biochemical pathway. I just made sure to write out to the side at which level of brain/spinal cord each event occurs. For the motor pathways, start at the top of the page with the motor cortex and draw the upper motor neuron travelling down to meet its lower motor neuron thru internal capsule, pyramid, etc. That way, come test time, all you have to do is have that picture in your head. Good luck!