Reddit and What I Found There

Tiganik, Priit "Neuroscience 2.jpeg" 11/21/2011 via Wikipedia.  Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

In an attempt to find topics in my neuroscience major, I turned to Reddit.  Unfortunately,  I found that most of the stuff on the site wasn't that much of a help.  It's site was a pain to navigate, and when I did find stuff there were either no comments, or several comments that contributed nothing to the conversation.  However, I did come across a couple conversations that were useful and had meaningful content.


1. What kinds of things do people in the Reddit forums seem to be arguing about, debating, disagreeing about or otherwise engaging in meaningful exchanges of ideas about? Give us a descriptive and clear sense of the kinds of stories you're seeing in the Reddit forums.

 I found that most of the threads were created to ask questions about specific areas of the brain and their functions, show specific findings/studies, and even how to use certain equipment and what methods are best.  Of the threads that actually had comments, most people seemed to be disagreeing on the validity of certain tests and procedures, and what scientists are studying.  Other threads often times will offer advice to the question-askers.


2. In your opinion, what are the two most interesting debates/disagreements you found in the Reddit forums? Hyperlink us to the two different Reddit threads and explain why you found those debates interesting. 

1.  The first thread that I found interesting was a short thread were someone was debating whether the Blue Brain project is attempting to model the human brain when they still haven't modeled the brain of a more simplistic animal, such as ants.  It thought it was an interesting thread because it because no one really argued, but instead offered logical explanations, such as the brain cells of ants being too small for neuroscience technology and the role of politicians funding certain projects and how researchers are a sense restricted in what they study. 
2. The second thread I found pretty informational and interesting was a brain imaging AMA with Ben Inglis and JB Poline.  I think what I found most interesting is that the debates and questions really ranged in terms of their level of knowledge. For instance, you had a couple people arguing with the guests over the the benefits of fMRI versus PET scans and how to interpret z-scores, while another small conversation was over how to explain a fMRI to a 5 year old.  However, most of the conversations on here seemed to be professional or college students in neuroscience who were asking specific research oriented questions.

Overall, what impression do you get of your discipline based on what you saw happening in the Reddit forums? Were the people in those forums talking in ways you expected or did not expect, about things you anticipated they'd be talking about or things you had no idea they'd be discussing?

I got the impression that my major focuses primarily on research and utilizes a considerable amount of imaging technology.  I found that most of the conversations for the neuroscience subreddit utilized better grammar and had more insightful information than other subreddits. Perhaps this is because I was looking at a subreddit that presented research information.  Originally, I tried to this blog post using dance, but I could not find any well thought out or meaningful debates.  This could be because I am not familiar with Reddit though.