Why I love neuroscience

I have been interested in the human brain for as long as I can remember. I always wondered why an organ that controls us wonders about itself. It seemed paradoxical and incredibly intriguing. Although I had many interests as a child, nothing could beat the science of the most complex thing ever discovered in our universe - our brain.

The brain is an organ that allows our race to climb to the top of the animal kingdom. No living being on this planet can produce a symphony, solve a complex mathematical equation, or write a masterful piece of literary art.

All of these complex tasks are truly marvelous creations that our brain is capable of, but my love for neuroscience lies in the many simpler things it can offer. As a naive second-year medical student, I enrolled in the Basic Neuroscience curriculum expecting to learn about some grandiose ways researchers unveiled our brains' inner workings.

Quite the contrary happened.

The literature for our neuroscience class was a textbook called “Neuroscience” by an American professor, Dale Purves.

A true shock for me and all of my colleagues was that it was the first textbook in which rote memorization couldn’t cut it. The whole book was written in various experiments conducted by pioneers of neuroscience, basically paving the way for all scientists after them. But what was interesting was the way those scientists conducted those experiments.

"To prove this, the researcher took a kitten and sewed its eyelid close for the time of this crucial period."

For example, there was an experiment where one researcher hypothesized that there exists a crucial time in brain development in which the brain has to receive certain stimulants or it won't develop properly. To prove this, the researcher took a kitten and sewed its eyelid close for the time of this crucial period. After this, the stitches were taken off, and the kitten's eye was perfectly healthy- it responded to light, but the kitten was completely blind in that eye. The reason for this is that the part of the brain responsible for sight in that eye was underdeveloped, and no matter how long after, the kitten was left permanently blind in that eye.

Another experiment conducted by Roger Sperry involved rotating a frog’s eye 180 degrees and allowing the severed optic nerve to regenerate (for context: some frogs can regenerate their optic nerves). After regeneration, the frog responded to visual stimuli as if the world were upside down. Sperry would show a fly above and to the right, and the frog would strike its tongue below and to the left, showing that its visual processing had not re-adapted to the rotated input. This demonstrated that the brain's wiring was fixed and specific rather than flexible or plastic in that situation.

Experiments like this made me fall in love with the experimental method, especially in neuroscience.

I was appalled at how simple yet genius (and gruesome) these experiments were.

Then there’s the mind-bending work of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry with split-brain patients—individuals who had their corpus callosum severed to treat epilepsy. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain, and severing it means each hemisphere can’t communicate with the other. In one famous experiment, a patient was shown an image to only their left visual field (processed by the right hemisphere) and asked to say what they saw. They couldn't say anything—because the right hemisphere doesn't control language in most people. But when asked to point with their left hand (also controlled by the right hemisphere), they could correctly identify the object.

This blew the doors open on our understanding of consciousness. It suggested that our sense of a unified self is a constructed illusion, and that perhaps there are multiple "selves" in one brain, cooperating and occasionally competing.

Another jaw-dropping area of research is the phenomenon of phantom limbs. Patients who have had limbs amputated often report feeling pain or sensations in the missing limb. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran used simple tools like mirrors to explore this bizarre effect. He discovered that the brain’s map of the body doesn’t automatically update when a limb is removed. The somatosensory cortex still expects signals from the now-missing limb, and in its absence, it sometimes misinterprets signals from nearby areas. That’s why touching the cheek of a patient might cause them to feel it in their phantom hand, because those regions are neighbors in the brain’s body map.

Ramachandran's mirror box therapy, where patients "trick" their brain into seeing the missing limb via a mirror reflection of the remaining one, actually helped reduce phantom limb pain, showing again how perception and brain plasticity can be hacked with surprisingly simple tools.

Ultimately, I love neuroscience because it's the only field that lets us study ourselves from within. The brain is both the tool we use to explore the world and the subject of our deepest inquiries. It’s as if the universe built a machine to study itself, and we happen to have that machine as a part of us. As Purves showed me, science doesn’t require billion-dollar machines or vast institutions. It requires curiosity, courage, and creativity. And few fields reward those traits as richly as neuroscience.

So if you ever find yourself wondering why people are the way they are, why you remember some things and forget others, or how a pinkish blob of tissue can imagine galaxies or fall in love, look no further than the science of the brain.

You won’t be disappointed.

TL;DR

I fell in love with neuroscience not because of fancy tech, but because of the simple, brilliant experiments that reveal how our brains really work. From sewing kittens' eyes shut to flipping frogs’ vision, early researchers showed how crucial timing, wiring, and perception shape who we are. Neuroscience taught me that with curiosity and clever thinking, you can uncover the secrets of consciousness, identity, and the human experience—even with the simplest tools.