Reader Responses to Frontal Lobes and Fun

Neuroscience—fascinating! So many different aspects and pathways! Let’s have an alumni/ae forum during Commencement Weekend on this very topic!

Interesting article. I believe that the history of neuroscience (and the Intro to Neuroscience course) at Brown goes back further than you indicate. As an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1970s I studied neuroscience through the psychology department and faculty in anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology in the medical school. I distinctly remember a team-taught Intro to Neuro course in the mid 1970s offered by Mitch Glickstein, Ford Ebner, Jim McIlwain, and others. The content of the Bear, et al. textbook that you refer to (which I used teaching neuroscience courses at UNH) closely parallels what was taught in that course. At the time there were a number of well-established neuroscience programs at other universities.

Thanks for the story on Neuroscience 10—it’s refreshing that so many non-concentrators are interested. Brown’s scholarly contributions to the nascent field of neurosciences date from at least the 1970s, when its multidisciplinary aspects attracted Nobel Prize Laureate Leon Cooper and others, including Professors Jim Anderson, whose course called Understanding the Brain (if memory serves) I had the good fortune to take in 1975-’76. Even though a subsequent independent study with Dr. James T. McIlwain disabused me of any notion of pursuing neuroscience (or biology, for that matter) as a career, the mind and the brain continue their fascination.