Unravelling Our “Rich Inner Life”

Do you remember the first time you learned everything was made of stuff? It blew my mind when I realised that applied to people, too. I knew that the universe was impossibly vast and I was a mere speck in it, but you mean to tell me that I constituted an entire universe of stuff, too?! The more I learned, the weirder the idea seemed. If I were just a pile of cells, how was I experiencing life the way I was? How did my cells know what to do? How were my ears able to appreciate the masterpiece that is ‘Everybody Talks’ by Neon Trees? What about my thoughts, my feelings of love and grief and existential pondering - is it all stuff?

Enter neuroscience. Simply put, neuroscience is all about the nervous system, which comprises billions of cells throughout the body with the brain taking centre stage. This one small organ (put your fists together and that’s the rough size of it!) controls almost everything going on inside you, from your automated breaths to your weirdest dreams. It lets you move in just the right way to run and hug and shimmy on the dancefloor. It takes external information - lights, smells, ‘Everybody Talks’ by Neon Trees - and makes sense of it to paint a picture of the outside world. In humans, it’s made up of 100 billion neurons and even more support cells and chemicals, all communicating to - in scientific terms - make stuff do stuff. I wasn’t being too hyperbolic when I described myself as a universe - that’s all happening in just one tiny you!

Since starting my Neuroscience degree, I’ve received a lot of widened eyes and “oh wow!”s when I’ve told people about it. “That sounds hard,” they often say, “I’d be absolutely clueless about that.” Honestly, I am absolutely clueless - and I love it. Up until one class when I asked my Biology teacher a question and he responded with a shrug, I thought I’d be able to pick up a textbook and find the exact three neurons that made me laugh at a pun or cry at a rom-com. The truth is, we’re still a mystery. Sure, we know the hippocampus is probably involved in memory, but how? Neuroscientists can bicker about it for entire conferences. The pursuit of answers on how we fundamentally work is what led me to put five Neuroscience courses on my UCAS application.

To me, neuroscience feels like more than the study of a specific set of cells. It’s also one of the many roads navigating the age-old question, “what makes us human?”. One of the most captivating - and elusive - focuses of neuroscience is human perception and consciousness. Deeply philosophical by nature, neuroscience aims to unlock the physical underpinnings (if there are any) of what great thinkers like Descartes have puzzled over for centuries. If you ask the standard person where consciousness comes from, they’ll likely point to the brain, right? But as philosopher David Chalmers puts it, “why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?”. If you assembled a bunch of neurons in just the right way, would it jumpstart the human experience? The question is so puzzling that it’s been aptly dubbed “The Hard Problem”. While we could argue ‘til the end of time about whether the scientific method could ever untangle something so complex, I like to think neuroscience has a decent shot, especially as we develop new technologies. Two centuries ago, we didn’t know DNA existed - what’s to say there’s not a substance for consciousness that we just can’t observe yet?

If you didn’t gather from my brief digression into philosophy discourse, neuroscience is an incredibly multidisciplinary field. While it’s fundamentally biological, it also draws on medicine, computing science, engineering, psychology, chemistry, and more. Even within biology, it isn’t isolated, requiring study of anatomy, molecular biology, immunology, pharmacology, and all the rest. Here in Glasgow, it’s not uncommon to find half the life sciences cohort together in Bute Hall. The reach of neuroscience isn’t limited to STEM, either. Ever heard of neuropolitics, neuroaesthetics or neuroeducation? It’s fascinating to see the principles of what’s often seen as a rigid, strictly-medical science influence the studies of creativity and the social world, and vice versa. Some specialties can find neuroscientists working with sociologists, philosophers, linguists, and historians. As someone who loves biology, but also wants to know about everything that’s ever existed, it really sounds like the ideal field to me. 

Of course, my first-year lecturers weren’t teaching me about neuro-informed policy or the biology behind the Mona Lisa. It’s still a study of living in the more basic sense - how the nervous system functions and how it falls apart. Neuroscience isn’t the same as the medical branch neurology (to my grandmother’s disappointment), but it still supports patients behind the scenes. Disorders like dementias, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and major depression are a common focus of labs worldwide, with the aims of detection, treatment, and prevention. For me, this is the perfect way to combine my how-does-stuff-work curiosity and my desire to help people (without passing out from seeing blood), and that’s not an uncommon motivation. Many of us know someone with dementia or have experience of a mental illness. Using neuroscientific study to clarify the early signs of Alzheimer’s or aid the development of antidepressants feels rewarding in so many ways beyond intellectual satisfaction.

Despite my graduation looming, I feel like there’s so much more to learn, and I don’t expect that feeling to wane anytime soon. The field is far too vast to contain in a five-year degree, let alone this one article, and I think wherever I venture I’ll always be searching for answers. At the crux of it, scientists seek to understand the world. I think what makes neuroscience special is that it seeks to understand the world within us.