Tonight
, at long last, I submitted my Master’s thesis research proposal which made me realize that I really am going to be a scientist for the next year few years, at least. After that, who knows? Perhaps I’ll keep it up or just drop everything and become a diplomat or anything else that I haven’t even yet imagined. So what am I honestly going to be doing here in France (besides eating wonderful bread, drinking absinthe, and playing amateur anthropologist in a country full of people who seem to have decided for the most part that you don’t need to make new friends after high school)? Well, in a sentence, I’ll be adapting a digital holographic microscope to use in imaging live neurons which have a special optical reporter dye whose fluorescence changes when the neuron becomes active.
The way I see it, the brain is amazing because it is a natural computing system evolved over time, not neatly engineered but somewhat brutally selected through evolution. Computing in the brain is neither perfectly clear nor precise, but it works quite well to fulfill many natural computing needs that our own computers designed by some of today’s greatest minds simply can’t achieve. So what is it about the brain that makes it so great? And how can we understand it better so we can learn to either reproduce it or introduce the biological materials directly into our computing machines to improve their capacity? These really are my pie-in-the-sky questions that draw me into this field but they are obviously far too big to tackle in a Master’s, especially during my first few months ever even formally studying neuroscience. I think doing a Master’s on synaptic signaling should probably be pretty interesting as this lets me explore the function of neurons, the fundamental computing units that come together to create what we know as intelligence. And at least it gives me a legitimate excuse to keep on hanging around Paris and feel like an at least marginally contributing member of society.
PS: This photo of me comes courtesy of my loving little sister.
, at long last, I submitted my Master’s thesis research proposal which made me realize that I really am going to be a scientist for the next year few years, at least. After that, who knows? Perhaps I’ll keep it up or just drop everything and become a diplomat or anything else that I haven’t even yet imagined. So what am I honestly going to be doing here in France (besides eating wonderful bread, drinking absinthe, and playing amateur anthropologist in a country full of people who seem to have decided for the most part that you don’t need to make new friends after high school)? Well, in a sentence, I’ll be adapting a digital holographic microscope to use in imaging live neurons which have a special optical reporter dye whose fluorescence changes when the neuron becomes active.
The way I see it, the brain is amazing because it is a natural computing system evolved over time, not neatly engineered but somewhat brutally selected through evolution. Computing in the brain is neither perfectly clear nor precise, but it works quite well to fulfill many natural computing needs that our own computers designed by some of today’s greatest minds simply can’t achieve. So what is it about the brain that makes it so great? And how can we understand it better so we can learn to either reproduce it or introduce the biological materials directly into our computing machines to improve their capacity? These really are my pie-in-the-sky questions that draw me into this field but they are obviously far too big to tackle in a Master’s, especially during my first few months ever even formally studying neuroscience. I think doing a Master’s on synaptic signaling should probably be pretty interesting as this lets me explore the function of neurons, the fundamental computing units that come together to create what we know as intelligence. And at least it gives me a legitimate excuse to keep on hanging around Paris and feel like an at least marginally contributing member of society.PS: This photo of me comes courtesy of my loving little sister.
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