Start by Exploring Your Interests - 2026–2027 Connectomics Research Competition

What Questions Excite You?¶

You do not need to know your exact research interests yet. In fact, your interests will probably change as you learn more, read more papers, and gain research experience. That is completely normal.

However, it is still useful to start thinking about what kinds of questions excite you. There are several ways you can begin.

Start With a Question About the Brain or Behavior¶

One approach is to start with something about the brain, mind, or behavior that you genuinely find interesting.

Perhaps you are curious about a cognitive process:

How do we pay attention to one thing while ignoring everything else?
How are memories formed and retrieved?
How do we make decisions?
Why do we sleep and dream?

Or perhaps you are interested in something that can go wrong, such as rumination in depression, memory problems in dementia, or changes in attention in ADHD. You might instead begin with a broader condition, such as addiction, depression, epilepsy, or Alzheimer’s disease.

If you start with a disorder, try going one step further and ask: what processes are involved in this disorder? Addiction, for example, is not simply one process in the brain. Researchers might study reward, learning, craving, decision-making, habit formation, or withdrawal.

You can then ask how the same question could be studied at different levels of analysis.

For example, someone interested in addiction might investigate how nicotine interacts with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors at the molecular level. Another researcher might study how reward-related brain circuits change during addiction, perhaps manipulating particular neurons in an animal model to test whether they cause a change in behavior. A human neuroscience researcher might instead use fMRI to investigate how brain activity changes when people see cues associated with an addictive substance.

Similarly, if you are interested in memory, you could study the molecular processes that allow connections between neurons to change, record activity from neurons during a memory task, or use EEG or fMRI to investigate how human brain activity differs when people successfully remember versus forget something.

One question can therefore lead you into many different branches of neuroscience.

Practical tip: When you encounter something about the brain that makes you think, “Why does that happen?”, write it down. You do not need to know how to answer it yet. Learning how scientists have tried to answer that question is a good place to begin.

Start With a Subject or Way of Thinking You Enjoy¶

You do not have to begin with a particular behavior or brain disorder.

Perhaps you already enjoy genetics and become interested in how genetic differences influence the brain and behavior. Perhaps you like physics and want to see whether some phenomena in physics can be applied to the properties of neurons or whole-brain networks. If you enjoy mathematics and complex systems, you might become interested in how interactions between thousands or millions of neurons produce organized brain activity.

Or perhaps you are fascinated by computer science and artificial intelligence and become interested in what artificial neural networks can teach us about biological brains—or what neuroscience might teach us about intelligent systems.

In other words, neuroscience can also be a place where an interest you already have meets a new set of questions.

Practical tip: Think about the subjects you already enjoy. Then try searching for combinations such as “neuroscience + genetics”, “neuroscience + AI”, or “neuroscience + physics”. Look at the kinds of questions researchers in these areas are actually working on.

Explore What Is Around You¶

Sometimes the easiest way to discover your interests is simply to see what research exists.

Perhaps, look at universities and research institutes near you. Browse departments such as:

neuroscience
psychology
psychiatry
neurology
medical sciences
biology or cell biology
computer science

University websites will often list their faculty members and research groups. Open a few researchers’ profiles and laboratory websites. What questions are they asking? What techniques do they use? You can also look up the titles and abstracts of some of their recent papers.

Do not worry if you understand very little at first. The goal is simply to explore.

Practical tip: Keep a small list of laboratories, researchers, papers, and questions that catch your attention. After exploring ten or twenty laboratories, you may start noticing patterns in what repeatedly interests you.

Your Interests May Change¶

Thinking about your interests early does not mean committing yourself to them.

You might begin university convinced that you want to study psychiatric disorders and later discover that you love computational neuroscience. You might join a molecular neuroscience laboratory and realize that you prefer working with human neuroimaging—or the opposite.

Exploring your interests early simply gives you a direction for your next step. It can help you decide which courses to take, which skills to learn, which laboratories to approach, and which research opportunities to pursue. Later, it can also help when choosing a thesis project, changing research groups, or considering graduate programs.

So, never be afraid to change direction as you learn more.

At this stage, you do not need to find the question you want to spend your career answering. You just need to find a question interesting enough to take the next step.

Using Generative AI to Help Explore Your Interests¶

Generative AI can be a useful brainstorming partner when you are still figuring out what areas of neuroscience interest you.

Rather than asking AI to choose a research field for you, use it to help you explore possibilities, make connections, and generate questions that you can investigate further.

For example, try prompts such as:

I am a high school student interested in why people form habits. What areas of neuroscience study this? Explain them simply and give me some examples of research questions.

I am interested in addiction. Help me think about how addiction could be studied at different levels of neuroscience, from molecules and cells to neural circuits, cognition, behavior, and human neuroimaging.

I really enjoy genetics, but I do not know much about neuroscience. What areas of neuroscience combine genetics and the study of the brain? What questions do researchers in these areas ask?

I enjoy mathematics, programming, and complex systems. Ask me questions to help me figure out which areas of neuroscience I might enjoy.

I am interested in memory. What are five very different ways a neuroscientist could study memory? For each one, tell me what methods they might use.

You can also ask the AI to interview you:

I am new to neuroscience and do not know what research areas might interest me. Ask me one question at a time about the things I find interesting, the subjects I enjoy, and the kinds of problems I like solving. Based on my answers, suggest several areas of neuroscience for me to explore and explain why.

Once something catches your attention, keep going:

You mentioned computational psychiatry. What is it?

What are some major unanswered questions in this field?

What would a researcher actually do day-to-day?

What skills would I need to start exploring this area?

Give me some keywords that I could search on Google Scholar or PubMed to find real research papers about this topic.

What university departments or types of research laboratories would usually work on questions like this?

The important next step is to leave the AI conversation, explore the real scientific literature, and gain a deeper understanding of the topic. Search the terms you discovered, look at laboratory websites, read papers and reviews, watch lectures, and see whether the subject still interests you. Guidance on this in the next section.

Generative AI can help you discover a door. You should then open that door and explore what is actually behind it.