Neuroscience

I think I understand what you’re saying. I have a medical background as well and I guess clinicians mostly use the results of (neuro)science in their work. Neuroscience can seem as one big field but many labs do exclusively mol. biology work, others work exclusively on developing theories/models, others focus on functional imaging. Even within the computational field, there are multiple subfields. These people often have very different backgrounds so not every neuroscientists will be able to do wet lab stuff, computational work is often done by physicists, engineers or mathematicians, … Everything is so specialised and crossing over from wet lab stuff (near zero math/physics experience) to computational work is extremely difficult so scientists often need to choose a field to focus on early in their career. It’s not as simple as running some simulations or doing some modelling for a specific question. For example some neuroscientists with a psychology background do functional imaging studies (fMRI, EEG, …) but if they would have a certain hypothesis that would require wet lab stuff, they would probably not have the knowledge or tools to do this. There are very few neuroscientists who know their way around all these different fields.

I’m more interested in the ‘fundamental' questions in neuroscience, how information is represented and processed, how consciousness can be defined and studied, how memory works, … These topics can be approached in multiple ways. For example memory requires both knowledge of the biochemical/cellular pathways and the mathematical/computational aspects so wet lab skills and computational skills could both be valuable. I’m wondering which field will be most likely to come up with some groundbreaking discovery.