Cognitive Neuroscience

My past few blog posts have been on my goal to become an Olympic sprinter, but today I'm switching topics from my sports goal to my professional goal. For the longest time I've been convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. I was going to go to UCLA and study psychology in undergrad then go to Stanford Law School after that. This past weekend, however, I watched three episodes of the show Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole on the science channel and I was sucked into the two episodes that had to do with the human brain. The first one was about the brain patterns of criminals and psychopaths and also the people who judge them. It talked a lot about the different parts of the brain and how a small change in one little section can cause someone to ignore the will to be good. They showed a study on the episode that proved people's will to be good started at an early age by doing a simple experiment on babies. The other episode, which was the most interesting one to me, was one about our subconscious. I was basically glued to the tv for the entire hour and I can't even describe how awesome it was.


Here's a link to the episode on YouTube.

I'm actually watching an episode now about eternity and next is the one on evil and then the one on the subconscious comes on. :) Anyway, this got me thinking and I decided that I'd really like to be a cognitive neuroscientist and study the mechanics of a brain and what makes people act the way they do. This website is something that I found that just provides a few recent studies and the overview of what they mean. I think this is a really good way to keep up with what's going on and to learn basic things about neuroscience. Another thing I found was just somebody's quizlet flashcards on high school level neuroscience vocabulary words. I thought that this was really interesting and that it would be cool just to check them out.

The last thing I have today is a summer program on cognitive neuroscience for high school students at Berkley University in California. I really want to enroll in this program because I would get fundamental information on the subject.

Here's a picture of some neurons.