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Neuroscience

A page within Neuroscience

UWL's Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Minor is a joint program between the departments of Biology, Philosophy, and Psychology. Although the Psychology Department is the administrative home, it is meant to integrate the expertise across all three core departments and other UWL departments offering elective coursework. This minor is ideal for students planning to pursue doctoral training in neuroscience, medicine, psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, or philosophy.

History of the Field

Neuroscience has been among the primary growth fields in the sciences over the last four decades. As a field of scientific inquiry, it has its roots in philosophical questions about life, human nature, and thought. The disciplines of biology and psychology emerged in part to seek answers to aspects of those questions using coherent techniques. Yet the core philosophical questions—such as the natural relationship of the mind to the brain or of the self to the other—these still remain and drive novel research. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a growing consensus among many scientists that much could be gained by bringing the disparate fields of study born of this centuries-long scientific diaspora back together. Contributions of physiological and psychological scientific study to psychiatric and medical discovery, for example, often require an understanding that spans molecular and behavioral levels of inquiry. Philosophy itself has come to address questions regarding the brain and mind with both greater variety and specificity, and now encompasses the logic of neural systems.

Neuroscience Minor Student Learning Outcomes:

  1. To understand core concepts in psychology, biology, and philosophy, providing the basis for scientific study of the structure and function of the nervous system and its relationship to behavior and mental processes
  2. To articulate the scientific questions, language, fundamental principles, methodology, interdisciplinary nature, and history of behavioral neuroscience
  3. To critically assess, interpret, and synthesize primary literature in neuroscience
  4. To effectively present student work orally, visually, and in writing
  5. To express how disciplines from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences work together with the neurosciences to address important biomedical issues confronted by science and society