/sci/ - Science & Math

Yale.

If you pursue academic medicine, get a gig in intracranial recording in patients undergoing surgery. You can do extremely poor studies using really vague, uninteresting tasks and take a ton of post-hoc liberty with your data analysis, then have only your main effects come up significant and still get top tier publications in basic science journals..

Example:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11239.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20120628

>>5057846
Mathematica is babbys first maths program. knowing babbymatica is like knowing how to use MS word.

>>5057717
I know that feel bro

LOL someone bumped all the daniella titan videos i love you /sci/

>>5057774
Whenever I take a step back and think about how I'm making my career, I have the same thought.

>>5057782
The neurons die, not the monkeys. Yeah, plenty of neurons die, but I still feel pretty bad about killing them personally. Neurons don't regenerate in most regions of the brain.

>>5057723
Monkey labs usually don't take undergrads, but who knows, if your university has one try your best to get involved.

>>5057725
Neurons are brain cells. While I'm driving the electrode into the awake/behaving monkeys brain, sometimes they die. When they die, they fire action potentials at an extremely high rate. Sometimes I look into the monkeys eyes on the screen when I kill a neuron.

>study neuroscience
>monkey neuroscience
>get all the girls telling them how cute macaques are
>"omg do you hurt them!?"
>i drive electrodes into subcortical structures
>i've personally killed at least 10 neurons this week
>we deprive them of water and make them immobile for hours on end
>mfw "nope, the brain has no pain receptors!"

Yeah sorry, my graduate program got me drunk for free. Not in any condition to do any thing but talk about science.

>>5052890
At what level are you trying to pursue science? Everything in the undergraduate curriculum can be beaten with practice/studying, self discipline and hard work.

The real need for brilliance comes when you want to conduct original research.

>>5049836
Across cultures (and species), hyperbolic models consistently fit intertemporal choice behavior better than exponential models. Before you jump at my throat and call this economics, hyperbolic models violate one of von neumann's axioms of rational choice and have been relegated to psychology thusly. Point is, they still fit better. Attached graph shows LL of hyperbolic and exponential models on monkey choice data. McClure is the last name of a researcher who does a lot of work with this.

Check out prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky 1980s That won a nobel prize in economics, but the two researchers are trained psychologists. They offered a quantitative framework for explaining risk aversion in human decision makers. This is also reproducible in other species (check out Laurie Santos' TED talk).

Drift diffusion models do wonderfully in explaining perceptual (and non perceptual) choices in many many tasks, including the famous random dot motion tasks. Check out Joshua Gold for more on this.

Its 1:00 AM so I'm extremely uninterested in scouring my endnote and google scholar to find purely behavioral papers that detail these phenomena. Because they're mathematical models that tend to predict the behavior extremely well (i.e., they're valid psychological theories), they see a lot of use in Neuroscience.

>>5049815
You know, aside from all the reproduceable and quantifiable results. Aside from those, its absolute bullshit.

>>5048953

"Hello Dr. Sciencedude,

I'm an undergraduate student of Psychology at lolstateschool currently working in assistantprofessor's Cognition and Decision Making laboratory. I found your lab's website while searching for doctoral programs to apply to for the Fall of 2012. Your work on reinforcement learning and related neural representations of the environment interests me. Which publications of yours do you recommend I read to get a better idea of your lab's recent interests in the matter? Also, are you accepting graduate students for 2012? I would be happy to send you any information about myself at your request.

Thank you,
anon"

In retrospect that email is far too detailed and extremely robotic. I'd remove the bits about the lab i'm currently in and I'd hold off on the request for publications.

>>5048953
I'll dig up an email that got responded to. Yes, essentially your different emails have shared components that essentially make them a cut and paste job, but so do your personal statements and your previous research statements.

So each department at each uni has multiple faculty with different demand for grad students. Sometimes a lab is full but other labs aren't, so the first lab won't take incoming students but the second one will, so the school still accepts students into that program. Every program is different. If you have to apply to a uni with a single lab in mind when you apply, then it helps to know beforehand if that lab is open so you don't waste time on the application.

There's also the possibility of lab rotations, in which you work briefly in 2-3 labs before you make a final decision. If this is the case, its extremely possible that you become interested in something that you never thought you'd be interested in when you were applying.

Defining the relationships between disciplines like that is naive.

What you want is evolutionary game theory, which is a formal extension of game theory, which is itself an implication of normative economics.

>>5048913
I would definitely agree that consciousness probably takes place in the brain. People like to assume that it takes place in the neocortex (the outer layer), but measurable deficits in behavior can be induced by subcortical (most famously hippocampal) damage.

There really isn't much else to be said, though. Just about everyone, layman or not, has the same idea about what consciousness is because no one really has a damn clue what it is or how to define it. It's helpful to forget about it all together and treat your brain as a machine that maps sensation to movement in a really really really really complicated way.

>>5048844
When you correspond with them, write an individually-taylored email. Make sure you address them by name, tell them what you're interested in that they do, and ask them if they're taking grad students in the next year or two. Condense all of this into ~5 extremely content filled sentences. The probability of your email receiving a response is inversely proportional to it's length.

If you do get a positive response from them, follow it up by asking them what current projects they have going on in the lab. Always assume that publications are about 2 years behind the cutting edge. You can also ask them about relevant publications for "better understanding their current work."

Also, don't be offended if you don't get responses. I probably got fewer than 50% of my emails responded to.

>>5048881
It's definitely interpreting stimuli (discerning the presence of an insect) and making decisions (inducing the appropriate change in physiology to the stimulus), but I suppose I can't speak to learning and memory. Perhaps some of the citations in the OP can, though.

>>5048856
Nobody knows what consciousness is. I think the most valiant attempts at defining it only got published in PLOS computational biology.

In science, we can't settle for pornography-like "i know it when i see it" definitions. That's lazy, and we should leave that to the social psychologists.

>>5048828
That is false. Cellular machinery that detects changes in the local concentration of any chemical and adjusts physiological properties of the cell accordingly, e.g. any signaling mechanism, is analogous to what the brain does. All the non-autonomic nervous system does is detect changes in the firing rate of sensory neurons and adjust the position of skeletal muscles accordingly. Of course, the sensory->motor mappings of the brain are EXTREMELY nonlinear and not markovian in the slightest, so much so that people are obsessed with this idea of free will as a lazy explanation for the complexity.

Anyway, that said, trees have systems level responses to external stimuli. There is a type of tree that engages a long-distance signaling mechanism to locally poison leaves that insects land on. I don't know the type of tree and I couldn't provide a citation, however, because I only work with organisms that have nervous systems.

Hi OP. First year neuro Ph.D student at a top 10 institution reporting in.

I was able to find some GRE study materials on luelinks and demonoid, although both of those services are now inert. I'm sure that you can find some sort of ebook with practice exams and sample problems for the new GRE on isohunt or thepiratebay. If you cannot, a 15 dollar one-month pass into usenet is going to be about one fourth the price of a GRE study book.

As for actual study methodology, just do practice problems. Doing anything else is very silly. Unless you've been studying GRE words for months (perhaps many months), the likelihood of you encountering any of those words on the GRE is low, and chances are you already know the meanings of the roots/suffixes/prefixes in those words that could be generalized to other words. If you want a success story, I scored 93rd percentile on the verbal section with absolutely 0 preparation (no practice problems, no vocabulary), although I was familiar with the format of the questions.

>>5043821
The signal that's being communicated is electrochemical. Electrical events happen inside neurons that cause the release of chemicals onto other neurons that effect the probability that those neurons produce electrical events.

These electrochemical signals work like this all the way from the retina to the muscles. How and why (and if?) that becomes thought is not known, and may just be an ill posed question.

Consciousness awareness of the exterior world probably happens in the cerebral cortex, though.

>>5043767
What do you mean? Neurotransmitters that produce fairly static postsynaptic effects will always be the way that cells talk. Glutamate will always produce a positive current in the postsynaptic cell, but the amount of current that it induces can change.

Of course, other transmitters (catacholamines, neuropeptides) are more complicated.

>>5043660
Your genes constrain the machinery that is available to the cell, as well as a large portion of your brain's anatomical connections and histological properties. "Thoughts" as you know them are not something that occur on the DNA level, gene expression takes far far longer to regulate than you can become aware of new things and form new memories.

Memories probably form from to changes in the physiology of the cell that alter the functional connectivity of different populations of neurons. Thoughts are caused (more specifically, behavior is caused) by the communication of these neural populations.