The term project for Introduction to Neuroscience is the construction and defence of a proposal for research on an unanswered question in any area of neuroscience. Due to lack of time and lack of facilities, you won't actually be carrying out the research that you propose (at least, not as part of this course). You should, however, develop a comprehensive grasp of the work on which your proposed experiment would build. Developing such comprehension will involve the following steps:

• propose a research topic and a general set of methods
• narrow this topic to a particular experiment
• search the scientific literature for background information and previous work
• write a paper that describes the question you want to answer, explains the methods that you propose to answer it, and interprets the possible outcomes of your experiment
• prepare and present an oral defence of your project

The goal at this juncture is simply to propose, in the abstract, a topic and methods. Write one page describing the sort of question that you intend to address with your project, and the sorts of methods with which you'd like to address this question. For example, you might be interested in visual perception. In that case, think about how you'd want to investigate visual perception. Would you want to do lesion studies on animals? Would you want to study humans who've suffered damage to particular brain areas? What methods would you use to evaluate and to quantify the visual processing abilities of the animals or humans that you study? Would your methods be behavioural, or electroencephalographic, or would you want to use some kind of functional brain imaging such as fMRI? Perhaps, if you're using animals, you might want to implant electrodes in order to record the activities of single neurons. This is only an example of a path that your questioning might take. Many other questions are possible but no matter what you're investigating you should pay particular attention to experimental methods. If you're having trouble selecting a topic or selecting experimental methods, please ask us. We expect to receive many questions on the project.