Neuroanatomy
If you already have a strong footing in neuroanatomy, you can skip this part. While it may have been more logical to put this at the beginning, it also would have scared off many more people. Yes, neuroanatomy is complicated, but no, it is not impossible. It’s a gradual learning process. Start off with the materials provided below. Over time, you will be able to learn more through reading papers and looking at results, but you need to at least have a foundation to start with.
Tip: If you see something you don’t know, take a break and look it up online to learn about it. It’s much more enjoyable to learn about regions that are relevant to something you are reading/working on than it is to sit down and drive yourself crazy with rote memorization.
Otherwise, you have a couple options:
- If starting with no knowledge of neuroanatomy, you should go through this Lumen Learning Course. It has some interactive activities you can do and is one of the least scary introductions to neuroanatomy.
- Introduction to parts of the brain
- Note: You can move through all of these (except the last three lessons) by clicking “Next” at the bottom of each page. I just provided all of the links so that you can pick and choose without having to click through everything.
- Brain Hemispheres
- Lobes of the Brain
- The Limbic System and Other Brain Areas
- Brain Imaging
- Note: Do the virtual lab for MRI too! The link to that is in the lesson.
- This is a good review of much of the prior information
- Intro to Neural Communication
- Neurons
- How Neurons Communicate
- Introduction to parts of the brain
- If you just want a quick (not actually that quick) refresher or prefer to learn from a lecture, this lecture covers some different material, but nonetheless gets the essential information across.