<p>Hi all:</p>
<p>I'm currently a Neuroscience PhD student at University of Southern California (end of 1st year) and just got accepted into Dartmouth College for a PhD in their Psychological and Brain Sciences program as a transfer student. </p>
<p>I really want to go into cognitive neuroscience, and I have the choice of doing human work at USC with a well known professor with connections, or go work for my old advisor who is new faculty at Dartmouth doing monkey neurophysiology on the same topic. There are lots of other factors that I have to think through myself, but I'm wondering what comments other people have. Is it better to theorize about the brain with human subjects and fMRI or do something more "sciency" to validate theories through impressive monkey work? Dartmouth focuses on teaching, and USC not as much. Ranking wise I think they are similar (maybe someone can inform me otherwise?), but undergraduate rank is higher at Dartmouth.</p>
<p>I'm confused, and will visit Dartmouth soon.</p>
<p>Are you for real? </p>
<p>Is it better to do fMRI or neurophysiology? What do you mean??? Better for what? for whom? You probably should use the technique that will help you address the questions you're interested in. Or combine both approaches if your research project calls for it. Wow, are you really in graduate school?</p>
<p>I guess I should mention that I want to study executive function and impulse control, there is a dirge of neurophysiology studies on the functional circuitry involved in tasks used to study this.</p>
<p>I do want to do fMRI work with humans but it has poor temporal resolution. In addition, the BOLD signal from fMRI is not necessarily a direct measure of brain activity, and according to my professor at USC, it should be used as more of a confirmatory tool rather than for discoveries. If you read a cognitive neuroscience book, you should find that most of the groundwork is paved by single cell recording work. In the end, there needs to be electrophysiology studies to back up the fMRI and theory from human work. </p>
<p>There isn't monkey research done at USC, but there is at Dartmouth which I can utilize. I can also utilize fMRI at Dartmouth but not with the great neurologists present at USC and their expertise on brain damaged patients and anatomy. hope this clears up what I asked, Neurotoxin222.</p>
<p>Ah, OK. Well thanks for clarifying things. It seems that you're well aware of the limitations of fMRI. Indeed many neuroscientists don't believe that fMRI is useful, and argue that BOLD doesn't mean much. So yeah, if you go into fMRI, you will run into people (mostly neurophysiologists and biophysicists) who will tell you your work is only correlative, that it's not quantitative enough, and that it doesn't teach us anything valuable. So if you choose that route, you must be prepared to defend your work all the time. On the other hand, there is a lot of funding available in many areas of fMRI research, and there are some things you can only do with humans subjects. So really it comes down to your specific project and your specific goals. Since you're wondering what comments people have, I'm gonna give you my 2 cents. Go with the project and the technique you're most interested in, rather than making a decision based on the brand name of the school, the connections of the prof, or the prestige of the particular method of investigation.
Good luck with tyour decision.</p>