Day 9

Friday, March 24, 2011

I set up a meeting with Neal in order to talk about the components of my question. I was not sure about the actual fields of study that I should aim to explore throughout my concentration years. I want to focus in neuroscience, neurobiology and all the subjects that relate directly to the brain, but I know that I need the social/ethical/psychological aspects of addictions in order to answer my question thoroughly. I worked on an outline on paper for about 2 hours to take to my meeting with Neal so he could see my interests and hopefully suggest some good areas of study that I could focus on apart from the biological perspective. We met for a 45 minute lunch in which we talked about the different areas of study that I should include in my question. First of all, I realized that there is so much more to addictions than just neural networks firing up. The concept of “addictive personalities” came up in the discussion, and I am interested in exploring what makes a personality addictive.

I feel like right now I'm too biased towards the deterministic aspect of things, I'd like to think that our personalities are a direct result of the secretion neurotransmitters and hormones. I had an interest for psychodynamic and humanistic psychology, which are based on the more subjective aspects of human behavior. I spent about an hour looking through my IB psychology papers and documents. I feel like I just need to read more about the things I used to be interested in high school, because from doing so, I just started to remember and get excited about psychology.