Mallory Long

The significance of knowledge can only be realized when it is integrated with other concepts to produce a valuable outcome.  Without the ability to apply specific concepts to other areas, some concepts seem to lack usefulness and become trivial.  Alternatively, successfully making connections across fields of study can prove to be a useful tool of progress.  This has been true in many scenarios pertaining to my classwork, research, and the scientific community as a whole.  Many of the courses I took taught things that seemed either irrelevant or redundant at the time, but as I progressed I came to realize how connecting the concepts help reveal their significance to the bigger picture.

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        In my PSYC 460: Physiological Psychology course, I learned that connectivity is a major component of the brain and its functions.  Millions of interconnected neurons send and receive signals from each other through an intricate system.  Each connection can differ in strength which can influence the capability of accessing that particular neural pathway.  The strength of neural connections can be increased through proper stimulation and is essentially the process by with learning occurs, this process is called neural plasticity.

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My understanding on the mechanism of neural plasticity strengthened as I began to realize the concepts application throughout my other psychology courses.  My PSYC 400: Learning and Memory course exposed me to the various processes that are involved in the memory acquisition of new information. By combining the topic of neural plasticity from my PSYC 460 course with the newly learned information on memory acquisition in my PSYC 400 course, I began to make sense of entire learning process on the biological and psychological level.

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 In my PSYC 405: Cognitive Psychology course I learned about the self reference effect which states that you are more likely to remember things when you associate them with yourself or things you are familiar with.  I recognized this concept at play when my PSYC 450: Sensation and Perception professor would assign papers where we would have to apply topics from class to our real life. As one of my artifacts at the bottom of the page I have attached a writing assignment that required me to apply a concept that I learned in class back to a real life example.  This class allowed me to integrate the knowledge from PSYC 460, PSYC 400, and PSYC 405 and actually observe how they applied to my life.

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The real life relevance of psychology inspired me to get involved in neuroscience research. As a research assistant at the University of South Carolina’s School of Medicine, I worked to observe the intricate connectivity of the various brain regions involved in emotional processing. I would spend hours meticulously preparing and imaging mouse brains to study the connectivity between brain regions.  The work seemed repetitive at times and the importance of my work eluded me until I proposed the grant aspect of my application for the Magellan Scholarship.  This document can be viewed as one of my artifacts at the bottom of the page.  Proposing this grant required a section discussing the importance and impact of my project, which made me reflect on my own work as well as the work of other students in my lab.  I gradually realized that my project was just one aspect of an ultimate goal that required the culmination of all our individual work.  By integrating our specific data, the lab sought to observe the functional properties of projections from numerous brain regions to the amygdala.  Each lab member contributes work that is crucial to the collective research of the lab but only when applied together.  This allowed me to realize that my work had a significant role in the bigger picture although it initially seemed minute on its own.  Although my work seemed minute on its own, the Magellan Scholarship proposal illuminated the significance of my work to the bigger picture.

Knowing the importance of my work to my lab’s goal, I began to wonder how our results could be used elsewhere and what the future applications could be.  In my PSYC 589: Introduction to Neuroscience course, I was assigned a paper to answer those questions exactly. By completing this assignment, I learned that the information gathered from my lab has the potential to open the door to further investigations into emotional disorders and treatment options.  Our work would serve as a platform on which new pharmaceutical research, behavioral therapy, and countless other medical fields can build and progress.  Another example of our lab acting as an integral part of a larger perspective came from the Community Neuroscience retreat where scientists from other research labs, drug discovery centers, and other fields came together to present their current work.  This showed me that our research can be connected to other aspects of science and function in a concerted effort toward an even greater goal.  I served on the planning committee for the retreat and was tasked with creating the logo for the event.  In my design, I included aspects pertaining to every department into the picture in order to reflect our pursuit of a common goal.

        Making connections has been a recurring theme throughout my psychology classes such as PSYC 460, PSYC 400, PSYC 460, and PSYC 589,  as well as my neuroscience research.  The ability to form associations between the content in different courses has given me a greater understanding of the important concepts.  The culmination of my lab-mates and my own work in the neuroscience lab provide invaluable data encompassing a broad range of properties.  Applying our research to other fields opens the door to a range of scientific breakthroughs and discovery.  Connecting concepts within varying realms of study can bring a fresh perspective to the subject and can foster advancement in the pursuit of greater achievement.