I am a retired neuroscience professor from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. In my posts I will give you my take on issues from the wonderful world of neuroscience, clearly the most fascinating of all the scientific disciplines (hard to believe some of my university colleagues might disagree).
I probably should have called my site Nyby’s Nerdy Behavioral Neuroscience Narratives but then I would have lost the alliterative effect I was looking for. Most of the posts will be on the relevance of neuroscience to human behaviors and are related to lectures I have given. The narratives will be a mixture of factual information and speculative interpretation influenced by many years of lecturing on these topics and discussing them with my students. My plan is to eschew obfuscation 😁 by presenting the information at a less-technical, less-detailed, and more informal level than I would in a class or a publication (at least that’s the plan). However, some background in introductory college-level biology would likely help. I certainly hope my posts allow you to better understand these fascinating, complex topics, and in so doing, find them as interesting as I do.
A couple of disclaimers:
Disclaimer number 1: While I will be providing information as I currently understand it, neuroscience is advancing at a dizzying pace. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve had to change or modify my explanations in light of new findings. So, you would benefit from a healthy skepticism, particularly for my speculations.
Disclaimer number 2: While I regard my posts as a good place to begin learning about these topics, I don’t regard what I am doing here as citable scholarship. The reason is that I will not be documenting many of the neuroscience relationships I describe. While I think I am mostly correct, to document all information sources, as I did in my published work and grant proposals, would take too much time away from playing golf and riding my fancy racing bicycle. The main reason I am writing this blog is to have something amusing to do that is not too time consuming. I apologize to scientists whose contributions I don’t always acknowledge!
So if you’re a student writing a paper, please go to the primary or secondary literature for citable sources. More often than not you should find my musings are correct, but even if you prove me wrong, you will have learned something about the fascinating field of neuroscience.
Access to all my posts can be accessed by clicking on the topics at the top or the menu button on the upper left.
John Nyby:wordpress.lehigh.edu/jgn2
