Fun at lab

This Monday I started working in a neuroscience lab at the NYU Medical Center, which has been great so far. I've been bouncing around from one lab to another for the past year or so looking for somewhere to settle down for good, so to speak, and this one definitely seems to be it. Not only are the facilities great and the work interesting, but the people are amazingly nice. And I'm the only undergraduate there which is always a good thing.

The lab is studying how the brain handles the intricate timing required for song production in finches. I know that sounds a bit abstracted from real life, and yes we scientists definitely stand the risk of spending out lives studying things no one else really cares about, but this actually has some implications. For one thing, we're studying songbirds because they are among the tiny percentage of animals that learn their vocalizations from others, in this case their fathers - and we humans are also in that minority. Speech production continues to be rather mysterious, so this research will eventually have therapeutic

possibilities as well as satisfying our curiosity.

More interesting, in my opinion, is that fact for all neuroscience has done, we still don't really get how the brain perceives time. It's one of those really simple things, seemingly, that is rather miraculous when you start to look at it closely. My long term interest is, roughly, in cognitive neuroscience, in other words taking philosophical and psychological questions about how the mind functions and looking at them from a biological perspective, so this lab is definitely feeding my habit. The final really great thing about it, of course, is all the cool science! If anyone thinking about coming to MHC Hunter is into science, I definitely recommend getting yourself into a lab once you've got a semester or two under your belt (just because it's a lot of work to take on right away). I've worked in a lab here at Hunter, and a couple elsewhere, and the experience is great and really satisfying.