Neuroscience

Pre-approved Topic List

1. A review of important neurobiology fundamentals.
2. How do genes and environment interact to shape who we are? How we determine their effects? Is one more important than the other? Where did our personality come from?
3. How can we study the brain? How do we know which brain regions are responsible for certain behaviors? What are the limitations to studying the brain?
4. How have evolutionary timescales and pressures carved human behavior? How can understanding the cellular basis of neural circuits explain our movements and the behaviors we make? Is human behavior entirely unique? What can we learn from the behavior of other animals in the evolutionary tree?
5. How did consciousness evolve? How do consciousness and intellect connect? Is there a limit to human consciousness?
6. How does the brain process and store information? How does emotion affect the brain’s judgment? More broadly, how do cognition, emotion, and memory mutually influence each other?
7. Where do empathy and sympathy come from? What can we learn about these from brain disorders and psychopathology? Does altruism really exist?
8. Why do humans and animals sleep? What purpose does it serve? How is sleep regulated?
9. As complex as decision-making can be, what do we already know about its underlying processes?
10. How do we perceive? What happens between when light enters our eyes to when we see objects? What is the difference between sensing and perceiving?
11. What is attention? How does attention control what we perceive? Do we have control over attention?
12. Why do we think about the brain as having “circuitry”? Are electrical circuits a good metaphor for how the brain works?
13. What are the limits of neuroscience in analyzing and understanding consciousness?
14. Neuroscience and Law: How can neuroscience influence our rules and policies?
15. Neuroscience and Gender: What can science tell us (and not tell us) about sex and gender?
16. How does the physical environment impact cognition? Are there cognitive benefits to green space in cities?
17. How does the brain produce behaviors? Is computation local or is it spread out over large-scale networks? What can we learn from human neuroimaging such as fMRI, EEG, and MEG?
18. How does the social environment influence the brain? What can we learn from human studies? What can we learn from animal studies?
19. General overview of frameworks for thinking about interactions between the physical and social environment, the brain, and behavior.
20. What is neuroplasticity? How does it relate to learning and memory?
21. Is there such a thing as instincts or innateness? Or is all of our knowledge acquired during development?
22. What is the relationship between anticipation, motivation, and pleasure? How are dopamine signals involved? How does this relate to addiction?
23. How does the brain generate affective states and construct emotions? How are the brainstem and amygdala involved?
24. What role does the prefrontal cortex play in attention, self-control, and decision-making?
25. How is the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe involved in episodic future thinking and knowing where you are in space?
26. How are music, dance, and language related by common neural processes?
27. How does the brain represent the semantics of language and process linguistic syntax? How does this relate to language disorders, such as aphasia? How can we understand the evolution of language by studying the brain?
28. How does the brain recognize faces? Why are people with prosopagnosia not able to recognize any faces at all?
29. How can we use neuroimaging methods to understand the function and structure of neural networks?
30. How can we use electrophysiological methods to understand neurons and information processing?
31. What are neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, receptors, ion channels, and synapses? And why are they so fundamental to brain function?
32. What are glial cells? Why are they so crucial to normal brain function? How are they implicated in many common diseases?
33. How do special adaptations in the brain allow bats to echolocate, owls to hunt in complete darkness, and birds to sing?
34. One of the most important qualities of the brain is its ability to change over time. What are the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in this process? How do they relate to memory and learning?
35. What are some common experimental techniques that can be used to study the brain? How do they work?
36. Of all the organs in the human body, the brain consumes most of the nutrients (glucose, oxygen, etc.) available at a given time. Why is the brain so metabolically demanding?
37. What are the mechanisms of touch? How is touch processed along the neuraxis? How is texture encoded in the brain?
38. How does the brain control movement? Are all movements encoded the same way? How do reflexes arise?
39. How can we restore senses such as hearing, vision, touch, and movement to individuals who have lost them? What are the current technologies that exist and what are their limitations?
40. What do neural networks and neuroscience have in common? How are neural networks used to answer questions about the brain and its function? What are the limitations of these and other machine learning approaches?
41. A neuron within a neuron: importance of endoplasmic reticulum in neurons.
42. Organelle contact sites: a new intracellular communication and their importance in neurons.
43. How is pain perceived by the brain? Why do different moods/states change the amount of pain we feel?
44. What are neuromodulators and how do they work?
45. What are drugs of abuse? How do they act on our neural circuits? From an evolutionary perspective, why do we have neural circuits that can be targeted by drugs of abuse?
46. What are the problems associated with consumption of opioids? Nicotine? Cocaine?
47. What kind of signal processing occurs in the retina?
48. How do we integrate information over time in low-light conditions?
49. Why do optical illusions work the way they do?
50. What visual cues influence where we deploy our attention?
51. How can we model content-addressable memory?
52. How can the local learning that takes place between pairs of neurons scale up to organize organism-wide behavior?