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buddyl91 buddyl91
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11 years ago
What is neurochemistry? What is the difference between neurochemistry and biochemistry? What is the difference between neurochemistry and neurobiology? Can you pursue a career in neurochemistry? If so, what steps should you take? Any information regarding these questions would be appreciated!
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11 years ago
So neurochemistry is very much like its name, the brain. You would mainly be studying reactions that occur in the brain that thus create on output in the human body. For example, if you are scared, you have a fight or flight response. A Neurologist would be curious why this happened? what chemically in the brain or body was released which created a response in the brain to either fight back, or run away. The same thing with getting mad or sad, what chemical reaction in the brain is making a person feel depressed. You will learn all sorts of things like how serotonin effects the brain along with dopamine, and many other things like the brain itself and how it reacts or creators electrical charges that send through the body. Human beings only react to their environment, and what you see hear and feel is what creates the reaction. Your brain tells your body to releases a hormone or chemical that will make the body react certain ways. You can indeed pursue a degree or career in nuerochemistry, in fact if you become a biochemist and reach grad school, you have the option to completely study whatever biologically you want, including the brain and its reactions. So steps to take are do a biochemistry major in college

Biochemistry (which branches into neurobiology) is more along the branches of becoming a doctor, a vet, or engineering new tools like hearts or livers that are made of various materials that can replace and function as a regular heart of liver. Biochemists will study the brain, as well as things like how when we eat, food is converted to energy, or when we breathe, what diffusion is in the lungs and what red blood cells do. Or even animals. They will also study genetics as this is becoming an important topic. All of my friends doing biochemistry in college are heading to become a doctor and creating very unique things like testing banana spiders that are sent up to space and then seeing which ones survived and exploring what happens under different gravity. We also study things like animals that have a specific function (like ants) that allow them to lift such heavy things or birds that miraculously know when to migrate and in spring will come back to the same home after being millions of miles away. With no compass or anything, obviously.

Also, one last very important thing in both neurology and biochemistry is medicine. Both of these careers will strive to create new medicines that will benefit people with mental problems, or solve or cure things like AIDS or even make things like AIDS viral (scary) to find ways to kill it if it ever became viral.

Too completely answer your direct question, though, neurochemistry will strictly focus on what is happening inside the brain and why it happens. Biochemistry will focus on everything with the human body, and animals too. That is the main difference. Nuerobiology will focus on things that happen to the outside of the body biologically like growing and what triggers growing, etc... But so does biochemistry.

I am a chemical engineer undergraduate so I have had a lot of experience in both as I have a bio emphasis. This is what I have been presented in my classes and it has all been amazing.

Best of luck!
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