Neuroscience Frontiers

This course introduces students to a bold, high-risk, high-reward framework for thinking about neuroscience, tracing the field's most transformative discoveries from the action potential through the present day. Each week, students will examine landmark breakthroughs drawn from the last century of neuroscience through the lens of unconventional thinking that prioritizes ambitious questions over incremental research. Students will engage in guided discussions analyzing how risk-tolerant scientific culture has historically driven paradigm shifts, and how those lessons can be applied to today’s unanswered questions. Additionally, scientific discussions will be had about unconventional ideas of memory, consciousness, bioelectricity, brain organoids, and neural regeneration. By the end of the course, students are expected to not only understand the history of modern neuroscience and exciting discoveries in the field today, but to articulate and defend their own vision for what a high-risk, high-reward research agenda in the field might look like. Students are expected to contribute actively to the discussion.