As some of the reader would know, my original academic background was biology, but due to (or thanks to) twist of fate I have been studying and working in various fields in engineering for over 30 years now (around 15 years until now as a wireless protocol engineer).

As most of kids do :), my dream has been changed often (probably I am dreaming on all different things even now :), I wanted to be a genetic engineer when I entered a university and wanted to be a neuroscientist by the time when I finish a graduate school. Working as a teaching assistant at a medical school (helping lab course for undergraduate studuent) and doing experiments on neural activities of a peripheral nervous system in cats with electro probes was my last experience as a biologist. This was over 30 years' ago (around 1990).

However, my personal interest as a biologest (ex-biologist) has hardly been faded away and reading articles/watching YouTube on various topics on biology has been the biggest part of my hobbies. Especially the interest in neuroscience has always been at a corner in my mind.

Just by reading and watching without doing anything myself, it would be almost impossible to be a professional. However with great help of technology like internet / YouTube and thanks to so many great minds /contributors who shares their experties and efforts posting articles and video, I managed to be a serious hobbiest on Neuroscience.

Recently I came to think that it would be nice to write some notes on this topics for myself and others who has same interests.  

Why I got interested in this subject ?

The first reason why I was interested in Neuroscience when I was in academia (long long time ago), I was interested in the subject just as an vague dream with no concrete reason. But I think the reason why I am interested in this subject recent years (like several recent years) is pretty obvious.

• I like to learn new things. ==> Unfortunately I was not like this when I was in academia. I would have been performed a little bit better in school exam if I liked studying / learning at the time :).
• Since I didn't study diligently during the school days, I haven't been habituated by the study/learning method being practiced in most of schools. For amost every learning/studing, I think I am doing in my own way.
• I want to understand more about my own thought process in more scientifc way, i.e in terms of brain science or neuroscience.
• It would be the best if I can persuade myself that my own way of studying / learning is on the right track with the aspect of science (neuroscience).
• I think I am learning things too slowly. I am a super slow learner. I think I retain a certain knowledge once I grasp it, but it just take too long time until I aquire the knowledge.  ==> Would there be any scientific background for this property ?  I am not dare to fix it if this is from some biological property encoded in myself, but I just want to understand on why I am like this.
• It seems one of the factors for my slow learning would be related to poor memory. I think my memory is OK (or sometimes pretty good) if something is within my existing schema, but I have too much difficulties in memorizing things out of my own context. Probably this would common to almost everybody since everybody tend to memorize better on those things which are within their own schema but memorize poorly on those which are out of their own context, but I think I am even poorer at memorizing things which are out of my own context. ==> Is this due to the intrinsic nature of my brain ? or Is it simply because I don't have much diverse schema ?
• I am very, very, very vision oriented (or vision dependant) in terms of learning.

How to study ? / Where to start ?

Whenever you are trying to learn new things after you finish school, the first question you would have would be

• There are so much information / materials that I can get from googling or youTube, what are the ones that I need to look into first ?
• Once I figure out what to start with, how can I extend or dig deeper into the subject ?

Obviously there is no single / clear-cut answer that fits everybody. The answer would be different for everybody depending on the detailed topics that you are interested in or personal characteristics of your own brain/cognitive process.

The only thing I can share with you for this question is my own/personal approach that I am using to study this subject. It seems that I am using similar approach to almost every subjects that I am studying after I finish all school program.

• Pick a specific topics you are more interested in comparing to other topics. In my case, it was memory and learning process. So I first watched a lot of YouTube videos and googled text about memory and learning.
• While I was going through those materials, I came across some terminologies / labels of parts on brain and I felt that it would not be easy to catch up the details of those material without basic knowledge on brain structure. So I wrote my own note about brain structure/brain anatomy. Of course, googled documents and YouTube video were my personal tutors.
• In addition to brain anatomy, you would come across various research method (and data from the research method) during the lecture or in the text without detailed explanation. I thought it would be much easier for me to catch up those lectures / text if I have fundamental understandings on some milestonic research methodologies and keep a note that I can easily refer to. This is why I keep a note titled Research Method.
• Another common items that keep poping up whenever I was going through memory/learning (actually any topics in neuroscience) was about the most fundamental structural and functional units of the nervous system called neuron. Almost everybody would know something about neuron as a type of common sense, but I think I would need to dig more further into neuron in order to understand the details on memory/learning process. That is, how neural signal propagates along various neural pathways and how micro and macro structure in brain changes as we go through memory/learning process. To better understand this aspect, I started looking into text and videos about neuron and neuroplaciticity.  Studying about Neuron was relatively easy for me since I learned pretty details on this topics when I was in Biology course in University even if it was almost 35 years ago. But I had to spent pretty much time and efforts on neuroplaciticity.
• While studying about Neuron, you would know that a key component for neuron activity is electric signal generation and propagate it along the axis of the neuron and jump over to next neuron (or cells). This signal generation and propagation is a huge topic and I decided to wrote a separate note for this titled as 'Signaling'. The signaling process can be divided into two sub process : one is electrical process and the other one is chemical process. The key players in the chemical process are neurotransmitters. You may put the details on various types of neurotransmitters in the note of neuron, but I decided to write a separate note for neurotransmitter since I thought this topic would get longer and longer as I learn more.
• Sometimes it was not easy to understand and memorize the details of neuron functionality (signal propagation mechanism) just by studying on normal operation / mechanism. One thing I have realized while I have been working in engineering field is I can learn a lot of things more easily from cases with problems than from cases with normal functionality. Actually the best was from the comparison of cases with normal function and cases with problems. This is where the topic neurotoxin kicks in because a lot of neurotoxins (especially neurotoxins from bio organisms (like snakes, insects, fishes etc) generate the toxicity by breaking some parts of signal propagation process in our nerveous system.
• From both my personal experience and textbook/lectures, I learned that motivation/rewards influence a lot for learning process. I learned Dopamine pathway is the neural circuit that controls the motivation/rewards which led to writing the note : Dopamine Pathway.

My personal Study Map / Interest Map

If I express my personal interest map about Neuronscience, it can be illustrated as follows. Basically this is just graphical representation of what I said in previous section. Again, this is just my personal map and you may have your own study map/interest map, for example, putting Dopamine Pathway at the core layer and research on all other topics just to understand the Dompaine Pathway (the core) as in detail as possible.