Hey Folks,

I just sat through a debate about the definition of neuroscience, with the synaptic studying folks feeling threatened by a proposal by the brain imaging folks to create a new PhD program that has Neuroscience in its name but will have quite a lot less of cellular and molecular work and instead will have a lot more imaging and statistics and cognition/affect/abnormal psych stuff.

Have any of you been through neuroscience PhD programs that were much more focused on scanning living intact human brains than they were on tissue samples in culture/model organisms?

Did you feel like less of a neuroscientist?

Do you think it's fair to call someone a neuroscientist if they've done little more than a single lab activity recording an action potential and have done no original work on the functions of the synapse?

Any thoughts on these kinds of tensions between basic/fundamental neuroscience and much more applied versions of brain study?