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This is my first post at a forum dedicated to neuroscience, and I have come hear looking for help getting started in my studies of neurology from people who have been in my shoes and are now working in neuroscience or studying at a university to someday work in neuroscience. I know this post is ridiculously long, but I beg of you, PLEASE take a few minutes to read what I have to say and if possible, give me some advice on how to best pursue my studies. I am currently a high school senior who is interested in learning more about perception, and currently, more specifically the perception of time and sound. I initially became interested in the subject of perception after watching the controversial movie What the Bleep Do We Know. Although many of the ideas in the movie are highly controversial (one expert whose research is borrowed from heavily claims that his ideas were manipulated and misrepresented while another claims to be channeling Ramtha, a 35,000 year old warrior spirit) and in many cases do not represent the prevailing opinion of the scientific community, I was not aware of this when I first saw the mind bending movie and it was successful in permanently changing the way I thought and the way I experienced the world around me. In the approximately six months since I first watched What The Bleep Do We Know, I have been constantly asking myself and others questions that I had never thought about before. Two particularly burning questions that have almost become an obsession to me are what physically happens in a persons brain that causes them to constantly experience their perception of reality an how/if these perceptions can be consciously controlled or altered (the answer to this question is immensely significant in my opinion because of the amazing benefits of having the ability to control different forms of perception, and in particular the perception of pain in uncomfortable situations such as managing pain while suffering through a visit to the dentists office, sitting through a boring economics class J, or having to listen to persistent annoying sounds like construction or nails on a chalkboard). Other areas of psychology and neuroscience that I find interesting include the causes and science behind the wide array of different human emotions, the way humans learn new information, how new memories are formed and stored, and for that matter, how diseases of the brain and specifically the hippocampus can deny a person the ability to form new memories (A topic of grave economic concern in addition to being the next great epidemic due to the estimated $250 billion the government will be forced to spend fighting Alzheimers as the nations most populous generation reaches old age). To give you an idea how consumed I am by these, and many other questions related with the workings of the human brain, let me give you an example. Last night while working on my final project for my economics class, I suddenly stopped what I was doing and started looking for information on Google Scholar regarding the possibility of enhancing the perception of sound without depending on the use of drugs. It was a question that I had spent a fair amount of time pondering of late and I probably would have looked it up sooner if I werent trying to get all of my homework done. So I began my search at about 9:00 pm thinking that the solution to my question could be to purposely alter brainwaves through meditation to recreate the commonly reported side effect of marijuana use (I remember learning that this pleasant side effect of smoking weed is caused by brain waves of a certain frequency that is outside the frequencies of normal, sober consciousness while learning about meditation back in December). This was an unsatisfactory solution to my problem however, as conscious manipulation of brain waves is a very difficult discipline (as I quickly found out while trying unsuccessfully to open my third eye and achieve enlightenment) that can take years to master and I wanted a solution that would work for the average person and not just Zen masters. So, my search continued uneventfully until about 1:30 a.m. Tomorrow I will probably continue to work on producing an acceptable answer for this or another similar question and enjoy doing it.
So it appears that I have finally found an academic passion aside from my hockey career (which has likely come to a devastating end agonizingly close to achieving my first obsessive goal of playing college hockey) like my teachers have been urging me to do throughout my high school years. The problem that I now face is that I have no idea how to go about getting serious about my study of neuroscience. While I could wait until college to seriously study neuroscience, there is no way that I can wait that long, so studying neuroscience on my own time has become yet another time commitment in my already crammed schedule. During this time, I have read The Mystery Of Consciousness by John Searle, a handful of excerpts from various philosophers on the subject of what is ultimately real, labored through the disappointingly dry pages of Aldous Huxleys work The Doors Of Perception that would one day become the inspiration behind Jim Morisons legendary band The Doors. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I wont graduate from high school until this June, aside from hours spent at the library or in my dorm room scouring the internet for new and interesting information, my classroom experience with the subject of neurology is limited to a semester-long English class about Alzheimers disease that focuses a lot on the science of memory and perception of the world around us. As a science class, this would be an incredibly informative class for somebody with my interests and I have already benefited from one portion of the class, which gives me the opportunity to spend some time with a woman who is suffering from moderate stage Alzheimers disease, but since it is considered an English elective, its focus generally rapidly shifts away from the science of perception in favor of reading pieces of literature featuring people living with Alzheimers disease such as The Memory Of Old Jack by Wendell Barry and Shakespeares poem King Lear. My previous experience with philosophy courses taken during high school is equally limited (1 semester-long class in Medical Ethics) and I have never taken a course on psychology. As a result I have had a difficult time grasping the information in some of the reading that I have come across. In hindsight, I wish I had began my quest for perceptual enlightenment as a school sponsored independent study (a wonderful benefit of attending a small private school that I have failed to take advantage of in my two years since transferring here) so that I could have the benefit of a teacher to sponsor and guide my research, in addition to receiving an extra science credit from the school, but this idea never dawned on me until it was too late for me to make any changes to my schedule.
So, as many of you are probably asking yourselves why I took the time to write this insanely long post, I was wondering if any of you who have been in mine or a similar situation could help me with two things. First, is there any reading out there that you would recommend to a high school student like myself who is fascinated by the subject, but is lacking in previous experience. Secondly, if anybody knows of any way for someone in my position to gain first hand experience in the Chicago area (i.e. internship program, conferences, or workshops) before to going to college that would be greatly appreciated. Some additional information that may prove useful in determining if I am qualified for such a program: I currently attend a small prep school that proudly maintains a reputation as consistently maintaining some of the highest academic standards of any school in the Midwest. On my standardized tests I scored a 29 on the ACT and a 1990 on the reformatted SAT. I was admitted to every school I applied to and plan on attending school in the fall at either Lake Forest College or the University of Vermont (barring the possibility of hockey opportunities that would put me in a position to earn a Division 1 scholarship in exchange for an extra year of development, most likely through a postgraduate year at a New England prep school), and although I originally applied to colleges as a business major (I wasnt sure what I wanted to do at the time so I picked what I thought was the most general major by default) last fall, I obviously plan to switch my major to something more along the lines of neuroscience, such as psychology, with the intent to make a living doing research in the area perceptual psychology. Also, any other advice from somebody who is currently working in this or a similar field would be greatly appreciated. Continued...on the next post, but I swear I'm almost done.
So it appears that I have finally found an academic passion aside from my hockey career (which has likely come to a devastating end agonizingly close to achieving my first obsessive goal of playing college hockey) like my teachers have been urging me to do throughout my high school years. The problem that I now face is that I have no idea how to go about getting serious about my study of neuroscience. While I could wait until college to seriously study neuroscience, there is no way that I can wait that long, so studying neuroscience on my own time has become yet another time commitment in my already crammed schedule. During this time, I have read The Mystery Of Consciousness by John Searle, a handful of excerpts from various philosophers on the subject of what is ultimately real, labored through the disappointingly dry pages of Aldous Huxleys work The Doors Of Perception that would one day become the inspiration behind Jim Morisons legendary band The Doors. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I wont graduate from high school until this June, aside from hours spent at the library or in my dorm room scouring the internet for new and interesting information, my classroom experience with the subject of neurology is limited to a semester-long English class about Alzheimers disease that focuses a lot on the science of memory and perception of the world around us. As a science class, this would be an incredibly informative class for somebody with my interests and I have already benefited from one portion of the class, which gives me the opportunity to spend some time with a woman who is suffering from moderate stage Alzheimers disease, but since it is considered an English elective, its focus generally rapidly shifts away from the science of perception in favor of reading pieces of literature featuring people living with Alzheimers disease such as The Memory Of Old Jack by Wendell Barry and Shakespeares poem King Lear. My previous experience with philosophy courses taken during high school is equally limited (1 semester-long class in Medical Ethics) and I have never taken a course on psychology. As a result I have had a difficult time grasping the information in some of the reading that I have come across. In hindsight, I wish I had began my quest for perceptual enlightenment as a school sponsored independent study (a wonderful benefit of attending a small private school that I have failed to take advantage of in my two years since transferring here) so that I could have the benefit of a teacher to sponsor and guide my research, in addition to receiving an extra science credit from the school, but this idea never dawned on me until it was too late for me to make any changes to my schedule.
So, as many of you are probably asking yourselves why I took the time to write this insanely long post, I was wondering if any of you who have been in mine or a similar situation could help me with two things. First, is there any reading out there that you would recommend to a high school student like myself who is fascinated by the subject, but is lacking in previous experience. Secondly, if anybody knows of any way for someone in my position to gain first hand experience in the Chicago area (i.e. internship program, conferences, or workshops) before to going to college that would be greatly appreciated. Some additional information that may prove useful in determining if I am qualified for such a program: I currently attend a small prep school that proudly maintains a reputation as consistently maintaining some of the highest academic standards of any school in the Midwest. On my standardized tests I scored a 29 on the ACT and a 1990 on the reformatted SAT. I was admitted to every school I applied to and plan on attending school in the fall at either Lake Forest College or the University of Vermont (barring the possibility of hockey opportunities that would put me in a position to earn a Division 1 scholarship in exchange for an extra year of development, most likely through a postgraduate year at a New England prep school), and although I originally applied to colleges as a business major (I wasnt sure what I wanted to do at the time so I picked what I thought was the most general major by default) last fall, I obviously plan to switch my major to something more along the lines of neuroscience, such as psychology, with the intent to make a living doing research in the area perceptual psychology. Also, any other advice from somebody who is currently working in this or a similar field would be greatly appreciated. Continued...on the next post, but I swear I'm almost done.
