|
"[In college] I was always better at the humanities anyway," confesses Darryl Neill, PhDed behavioral neuroscientist and chair of the Psychology department at Emory, a wry grin spreading across his face.
At Eckerd College, his first love was French Existentialism. "My interest was in why wars happen; political ideology I was interested in human nature." Yet by his sophomore year of college, he'd made a drastic course correction. "I decided that what we now call neuroscience held the answers to the questions I had."
Research Interests
"I'm interest in the parts of the brain that get us in trouble. In other words, sex, drugs, and rock & roll."
Dr. Neill's studies the "reward systems" of the mammalian brain. Brains have separate systems that rewards their owners for certain actions: thus, when a rat has sex, eats its favorite food or downs a cocaine tablet, the reward system activates and the rat experiences pleasure. As a side effect, the reward system / pleasure response imbues the memory of that action with a positive 'emotional valence.'
One prevailing theory holds that the brain has only a single reward system, which yields easy explanations for things like depression: perhaps the anhedonia (or inability to experience pleasure) of depression is simply the under-activation of this single reward system.
In contrast, Dr. Neill asserts that there are two reward systems. "Actually, I suspect that there are multiple reward circuits that evolved at different times, but two is all I can really talk about yet."
He remains humble about his work. "My goal is to contribute to the ongoing discussion. Of course I would love for the multiple reward systems idea to advance things." He's careful to point out that science is generally not a string of eurekas, but rather a slow accumulation of information. "I had one undergraduate ask me, so did you discover anything lately? It's not like that."
Despite the difficulty and tedium involved in bench work, Dr. Neill has that reverence for research that many of his colleagues share. "There is something about when you've got data in lab, holding it and knowing that you are the only person in the world who yet knows that."
As a graduate student he had a professor who would show his students long ticker tapes of data. "He called them his conversations with God."
Teaching Interests
"To get paid to go and research this- and then to teach, to talk about it, is ridiculous, it's great. I love it."
Neill is one of the founding masterminds of Emory's Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program- a major that allows students to take courses from Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology in addition to four core courses focusing on Neuroscience and its implications for every other field that deigns to deal with creatures possessed of a nervous system.
"The problem is that there's a lot of hooey in psychology," Neill notes, referring, in part, to psychology's roots in Freud's often less-than-scientific proclamations about the nature of the human mind. Not one to stand for hooey, Dr. Neill guided Emory's psychology department in efforts to re-vamp its intro-to-psych class, focusing the first semester of it on biology. "What we've done is an acknowledgement of the fact that psychology is based in biology."
Dr. Neill doesn't use notes when teaching his classes. "It's always right out of my head I dream, eat, and breathe this stuff." Pupils in Drugs and Behavior, one of the two undergraduate courses he currently teaches, have the advantage of learning from a professor whose research on brain reward systems directly informs his teaching of the subject matter.
For the undergraduate interested in a career in the sciences
With respect to a PhD in biology itself, Dr. Neill emphasizes that "the job market really isn't all that great. That's why you have to be a fanatic. You have to love this stuff."
Yet he also concedes that there are some fields that are red-hot and on their way to positively Venusian temperatures in the coming decades. "Molecular biology and neuroscience are where the action is. And if you're a molecular neuroscientist, then just hold your hand out- you'll be in demand."
And the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology major at Emory is in position to feed that demand. Within a year of its inception, there were 100+ students in the program, and a year after that it was over 200. 10% of Emory's first class of the second millenium will graduate with a B.S. in NBB.
The growth of the NBB major is emblematic of the rapid growth of the field as a whole: Twenty or so years ago, the Society for Neuroscience held its first meeting in a motel in Albequerque, New Mexico. This year's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience will have 26,000 attendees presenting a staggering 15,000 scientific papers.
On the intersection of religion, scientific reductionism, and biological determinism
Dr. Neill occasionally ponders the idea of teaching an undergraduate seminar on Ethics, Religion, and Neuroscience. A dip into his worldview, obviously influenced by his existentialist background as well as his status as a neuroscientist, reveals what the shape of such a class might be:
Dr. Neill describes himself as a logical positivist, a term that's often interchangeable with scientific empiricism. Which, in his own words, means that "there is a reality and we can gather information about it."
His research on the brain, a field seemingly far distant from the vagaries of metaphysics and Camusian logic, is actually integral to the sort of root-of-existence questions humanity has been pondering since the advent of sentience. Dr. Neill sees in many researcher's systematic dissection, labeling, and describing of the human brain a trend with this as its end:
"What if the evidence becomes overwhelming that the human mind is nothing more than the physical brain?"
He wonders whether or not this is one instance in which such information shouldn't be disseminated to the public at large. He points out that religion or communism or any other belief system are an organizing, motivating force that, perhaps, keeps us in check.
"I know that sounds silly but then I start thinking of us as primates Human brains evolved. It's like Plato said, we have these primitive drives, and over them, a veneer of civilization."
Other interests
Dr. Neill spends most of his free time reading popular books on his chosen field of study. Other hobbies include his self-confessed obsession with computers, which has afflicted him ever since 1976 and the first home computer ever, the Altair, which, he reports gleefully, had 8k of memory and ran a version of BASIC that came on paper punch-tape.
|
