An Interdepartmental Major

Neuroscience explores how the nervous system develops and how it functions to generate behavior, emotion, and cognition. Neuroscience is highly interdisciplinary, integrating biology, psychology, chemistry, physics, and computer science. Exploring the complexity of the nervous system requires analyses at multiple levels. Neuroscientists investigate how genes and molecules regulate nerve cell development and function (cellular/molecular neuroscience), explore how neural systems produce integrated behaviors (behavioral neuroscience), seek to understand how neural substrates create mental processes and thought (cognitive neuroscience), and use mathematics and computer models to comprehend brain function (computational neuroscience). In studying how the brain and nervous system function normally and during disease states, neuroscientists also hope to better understand devastating neurological and psychiatric disorders.