One idea: figure out why specifically you want to learn neuroscience (for some project? thing you want to write? question you want to answer?) and then let your learning facilitate the thing you are doing as a test of whether you’re learning well or not. (E.g. post an essay about your neuroscience-based conclusions on an online community for neuroscientists and see what they think.) Neuroscience is a bit of a bad fit for this kind of learning by doing though.
That is the general approach I’ve been taking on the issue so far- basically I’m interested in learning about consciousness, and I’ve been going about it by reading papers on the subject.
However, part of the issue that I have is that I don’t know what I don’t know. I can look up terms that I don’t know that show up in papers, but in the literature there are presumably unspoken inferences being made based on “obvious” information.
Furthermore, since I have a bias toward novelty or flashiness, I may miss things that blatantly and obviously contradict results that any well-trained neuroscientist or cognitive scientist should know and end up believing something that couldn’t be true.
Do you have recommendations for places where non-experts can ask more knowledgeable people about neuro/cog sci? There exists a cognitive sciences stack exchange, but it appears to be poorly trafficked- there’s an average of about one posting per week.
One idea: figure out why specifically you want to learn neuroscience (for some project? thing you want to write? question you want to answer?) and then let your learning facilitate the thing you are doing as a test of whether you’re learning well or not. (E.g. post an essay about your neuroscience-based conclusions on an online community for neuroscientists and see what they think.) Neuroscience is a bit of a bad fit for this kind of learning by doing though.
That is the general approach I’ve been taking on the issue so far- basically I’m interested in learning about consciousness, and I’ve been going about it by reading papers on the subject.
However, part of the issue that I have is that I don’t know what I don’t know. I can look up terms that I don’t know that show up in papers, but in the literature there are presumably unspoken inferences being made based on “obvious” information.
Furthermore, since I have a bias toward novelty or flashiness, I may miss things that blatantly and obviously contradict results that any well-trained neuroscientist or cognitive scientist should know and end up believing something that couldn’t be true.
Do you have recommendations for places where non-experts can ask more knowledgeable people about neuro/cog sci? There exists a cognitive sciences stack exchange, but it appears to be poorly trafficked- there’s an average of about one posting per week.
That’s not true. At the moment the rate of new questions is 2.7 per day. That’s still low but enough to go there to post your questions.
Just go ahead and ask your questions.
I don’t know about neuro/cog sci in particular, but you might try Quora or http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science