The final blog. I can’t believe the semester is over. It doesn’t seem real – there isn’t even snow on the ground. I would like to end my semester with one last blog about some things I learned in neurochem.
The brain is cool.
This semester, our class delved into the complexities of the human brain. As a biology/chemistry student who had never had a neuroscience class, a class about the brain seemed pretty daunting. However, after doing much research, reading many papers, and being taught by my neuroscience-loving classmates, I feel much more comfortable talking about this crazy organ. It seems completely unfathomable and amazing to me that our brains can do the complex things they do – using chemistry. It’s awesome.
Scientists are cool.
This leads me to another thing Neurochemistry has taught me – it’s fun to get together with scientists and talk about science. We are nerdy and awesome people. This class was especially interesting because people from so many areas took this class – neuroscience, psychology, biology, chemistry, philosophy. I think our different backgrounds really brought a diversity of information and topics to the table which really enriched my experience. Getting together and talking about science is fun.
The brain is an unsolved mystery.
Who knew that so many disorders and diseases concerning the brain are still uncharted territory?! Before this class, I would have thought that scientists would have already figured out the exact mechanisms of things like autism, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, bipolar, smoking, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, migraines, and the effects of drugs like opioids and alcohol. However, this isn’t the case! There are still so many mysteries concerning the brain which makes reading papers in Neurochemistry so exciting.
Everyone is a little messed up.
What is normal anymore? Neurochemistry class taught me that the “normal” brain seems to be nonexistent. We asked repeatedly every week – what if we knew everything about the brain so that we could just give everyone their set of drugs and everyone would be perfect? Would we all be the same? Would you want to change? We also learned that our environment is important and that our parents probably had a hand in messing us up a little bit. Thanks Mom and Dad.
That’s about it. Neurochemistry has been a really awesome class. Merry Christmas!
Things I learned…
