Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system. Your nervous system helps you think, feel, and act. It also controls things your body does without thinking—really important things, like breathing.

The nervous system includes your brain, spinal cord, and all your nerves. Together, your brain and spinal cord is the nervous system’s main “processing centre”

Neuroscientists—scientists who study the nervous system—examine everything from the inside of cells to cell networks, to how the nervous system controls how people behave and act. Neuroscientists may study how the brain normally works and what could happen to it when things aren’t so normal—like when a person misuses drugs.

When a person takes drugs over a period of time, it can change how their brain functions. In fact, drugs can make such big changes in the way parts of the brain function that the person sometimes can’t stop using drugs or alcohol—even when they want to. That’s addiction.

Cognitive neuroscience addresses the questions of how psychological functions are produced by neural circuitry. The emergence of powerful new measurement techniques such as neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI, PET, SPECT), EEG, MEG, electrophysiology, optogenetics and human genetic analysis combined with sophisticated experimental techniques from cognitive psychology allows neuroscientists and psychologists to address abstract questions such as how cognition and emotion are mapped to specific neural substrates. Although many studies still hold a reductionist stance looking for the neurobiological basis of cognitive phenomena, recent research shows that there is an interesting interplay between neuroscientific findings and conceptual research, soliciting and integrating both perspectives. For example, neuroscience research on empathy solicited an interesting interdisciplinary debate involving philosophy, psychology and psychopathology. Moreover, the neuroscientific identification of multiple memory systems related to different brain areas has challenged the idea of memory as a literal reproduction of the past, supporting a view of memory as a generative, constructive and dynamic process

Neuroscientists and other kinds of researchers work together to find ways to prevent or treat diseases like addiction that affect the brain and other parts of the body.

So, neuroscience is important. Understanding how the nervous system works can help us understand, prevent, and improve treatment for problems with drugs.