Neuroscience Major Concentrations

The neuroscience major at JHU requires that students choose to 'concentrate' or specialize in either cellular, systems, or cognitive neuroscience.

At a basic level, this is what they mean:
 * Cellular: action potentials, cell membranes, drugs, genes, etc.


 * Systems: circuits, mapping structure to function, sensory systems

A good starting point is to read the JHU neuroscience department's explanation of the three: http://krieger.jhu.edu/neuroscience/academics/requirements/
 * Cognitive: higher level functions; mental representation of brain processes

Sometimes distinguishing between these three is difficult. If you read the above link, you’ll notice that systems and cognitive both involve mapping structure to function, and both involve higher level function…so what’s the difference?
 * Cognitive pieces together results of experiments to find how your brain represents and categorizes information, and which parts of your brain do what
 * Breaks a task up into a series of smaller tasks/computations and links these tasks to the brain regions necessary to complete them


 * Systems shows which cells are communicating and how they are communicating in order to create the representations observed in cognitive (e.g. modulation)
 * Structure & function and how that creates representations


 * Basically, systems is the details and inner workings of cognitive representations, while cognitive just looks at which part does what (but not how the cells talk to each other to enable these tasks)
 * An example of a question asked in cognitive neuroscience could be, 'Task X requires smaller tasks A and B. What happens when a brain region necessary for task A is damaged?'
 * An example of a question asked in systems neuroscience could be 'Does inhibition of the circuit responsible for sensation X result in behavior Y?'