Social mediums often create the sense of a small world. Allowing every interest, every person, every happening, to be at the tip of your fingertips. This sense of a personal bubble and falsified feel of everything you need right in front of you has now been proven false to me after expanding my horizons on social media and discovering the intellect, people, and ideas that are just a click or swipe away.
Redfield, Rosie. "Recommended Twitter accounts for neuroscience grad students to follow" 05/15/15 via RRResearch. Public Domain Dedication License.
1. The theme of every debate, every argument, every exchange of ideas, in this world is the differentiation in how or why a party thinks about something. Social media encompasses this in that is based on one universality - the distribution of ideas. Whether it be favoriting a humorous 140-character composition or sharing an environmentalist account's propaganda video, social media celebrates the exchange of ideas. Neuroscience, a discipline concerning both biological and cognitive facets of the brain, can be described as the holistic study of how we form these ideas, these arguments, these emotions. Several of the accounts and discussions I followed circulate not only the latest scientific studies in the field, but the tendencies displayed on social media from a neurological perspective. For instance, a member of MIT's neurology department who doubles as a Twitter user has developed and shared an algorithm for the probability of a user to share or like a picture based on the assortment and hue of the colors alone. On the other hand, a scholar pursuing his PhD in the field is inquiring for data via Twitter poll for his latest study. Just like the interdisciplinary field that is neuroscience, there are indescribable amounts of undiscovered discussions, data, and ideas to be discovered by tweeters across the web.
2. The most appealing of this exploration of neuroscience on Twitter was not so much the nitty-gritty concrete science or engaging conversations being presented, but rather the personalities tweeting and sharing the information. I noticed across every user a universal sense of passion for discovery and intellect but as well as a personable identity in the compositions. Personally, I find cynicism very intriguing as I am a consistent user of sarcasm in my day-to-day life. That is why I found @drugmonkeyblog's feed particularly interesting and engaging. His will to reply, often sardonically, back to users replying to his tweets in an effort to assert his point in a casual manner while discussing the most serious and most scientific of matters such as that of neurological consequences of Adderall abuse in students engaged me in scientific discussion like never before. The discoveries within neuroscience and the explanation and observation of thinking chemically and in respect to data and trends fascinates me, and that is why an Oregon mother with a Neuro-PhD's feed grabbed my attention. The stories she shares are ones that are appealing to the average Joe because of her succinct, understandable presentation and explanations of them. Some other accounts were verbose and complicated in nature regarding similar topics which drifted my attention away. However, for example, Summer E. Allen's study regarding the innate yearning for every primate to build a sleeping platform is something that may be obvious to everyone but has yet to be purely explained. She adds intriguing snippets of information such as that humans have relatively large brains but sleep significantly less than other animals and provides a link for those looking for an explanation. Adding a voice and personality to bland science really introduced me to a newfound passion for the neuroscience discipline.
3. As discussed just previously, the way some users talked engaged me like never before regarding my major. This is not only because of the fascinating ideas they were talking about, but the relatable and personable voices and tone behind them. The impression I ascertained from this entire process is that science does not have to be boring, especially neuroscience. There is so much to discover, and that is why I chose this relatively unexplored field primarily. There is passion throughout the neuroscience field because you are not just discovering science, you are essentially discovering yourself.
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