BVO: History of Neuroscience through the Nobel prizes
Neuroscience is still a rapidly growing field and the ever increasing knowledge forces students to learn more and more factual details. Conversely, timely restrictions limit their ability to learn about the history of neuroscience and the origins of ideas that are at the center of today´s knowledge. These historical findings, however, are also excellent learnings paradigms to study scientific praxis, which includes carefully studying processes of interest, developing theories, planning experiments or testing and verifying hypotheses.
To offer students an opportunity to engage with the exciting history of neuroscience and to learn from its highlights, we offer a lecture series devoted to the history of neuroscience through the Nobel Prizes. For that purpose we planned a series of sixteen lectures (45 minutes) addressing different Nobel Prizes, ranging from first descriptions of brain structures in 1906 to the elucidation of the circadian rhythm in 2017.
A multidisciplinary team of lecturers from different areas of neuroscience, primarily belonging to the Medical University of Vienna but with support from the University of Vienna and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, have agreed to contribute a lecture.
Students should acquire knowledge of the historical developments of neuroscience including awardees, major findings and the sequence of these findings. Moreover, they should be able to reconstruct the key experiments that were important for the suggestion of new ideas and concepts. In addition, they should be able to relate these findings with the actual state of knowledge in the respective field. Finally, students should be able to name scientific traditions foundational to the different research domains of neuroscience and should be aware of major debates that have been solved by the findings of the Nobel prize awardees.
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