BM Tutorial Schedule – Dr Jan Schnupp

 

Instructions: (please read carefully!)

To prepare the tutorials I would advise that students prepare an essay for each tutorial. I intend these essays to be practice for writing good answers in the exam. I therefore suggest you try to write these essays as if you were in an exam-type situation.

First do the reading you think you need to do. The reading lists are suggestions. (You should be old enough to choose your own reading material, and to decide how much reading you should do!) At this stage, if there are any terms, concepts or mechanisms you don't understand, make a list of questions to ask me and bring that list to the tutorial.

Before you start writing, pause for a moment to decide which bits of the knowledge you have acquired through your reading are relevant to the question, and how they fit together, then write the essay. You would be amazed how many students just regurgitate bits of book chapters with scant regard as to whether what they write is actually pertinent to the question at hand.

Try writing with the book closed to exercise your memory, and spend no more than an hour actually writing – you wouldn't have more time to spend on an answer in the exam either. Remember: the tutorial essays don’t contribute towards your final result, but the exams do!  Clearly, you should tailor your essay writing so as to improve your exam skills. Writing essays is for your benefit – if you don't write them it's less work for me, but you will be missing an opportunity to practice for your exams. Do not write more than five handwritten or 3-4 word-processed pages. (I won't have time to read more than that, and in an exam you should be able to get more than 70% of the available marks on the first two pages if you write concisely and don't stray away from the question. Prose becomes almost invariably more powerful if you say it with fewer words, so practice getting to the point.) A word on diagrams and sketches: some students find that drawing sketches helps them memorize visual data, and that’s fine. If you aren’t particularly good with words, drawing a sketch in an exam can help getting knowledge on paper, but unless you are good at drawing quickly I would recommend you stick to words and don’t waste time on drawing.

To get the most benefit it would be useful if I could have the essays in ideally 48 hours before the tutorial, so I get a chance to mark them and to identify and remedy any misunderstanding you may have. By far my preferred way of getting essays is word-processed and sent as e-mail attachment, but handwritten essays are fine if you write legibly and leave a bit of a margin for me to add comments. If you want to hand in essays on paper, send them to my pigeonhole either in Physiology or at St Peter's.

Venue:  All tutorials will be held in room "Besse 7" in St Peter's College unless otherwise agreed. 

Any questions: e-mail me (jan@physiol.ox.ac.uk).

Looking forward to seeing you in the tutorial.

Michelmas Term

1) Somatosensation:

"Even blindfolded, most people can easily rummage through a bag full of diverse objects to retrieve, for example, a bunch of keys. To do this, they must be able to almost 'see with their fingers'. Describe neural structures and mechanisms that contribute to this remarkable ability."

Reading:

2) Pain:

"Describe the peripheral and central mechanisms involved in the perception of pain. How can they be modified?"

Reading:

3) Vision 1:

"How are visual images captured and encoded by the retina?"

Reading:

Bear;

if you are keen look at Squire / Zigmond "Fundamental Neuroscience"

This is potentially a very large topic. Try to cover transduction and the retinal circuitry in some detail, leaving optics largely aside. Make sure you relate the mechanisms you describe back to the problem of image encoding!

If you want to dig a little deeper into this fascinating topic, look at the review article by Heinz Waessle published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2004 5:747.

 

4) Vision 2:

"How are stimuli represented in the primary visual cortex?"

Reading:

Hilary Term

5) Hearing 1:

"Which mechanisms within the cochlea and auditory nerve are thought to encode sound frequency and sound intensity?"

Reading:

6) Hearing 2:

"Describe the brainstem mechanisms thought to underlie our ability to localiye sounds in space."

Reading: same sources as Hearing 1.

7) Motor Cortex:

“What are the presumed roles of the primary motor cortex, the premotor area and the supplementary motor area respectively? What experimental evidence supports these theories?”

Reading:

Other media:

There are a couple of you-tube movie clips on the web which are relevant to this.

8) Basal Ganglia:

"Explain why Parkinsonism and the early signs of Huntington's chorea are both due to dysfunction of the basal ganglia, but lead to very different, in some senses, opposite disturbances of the motor system."

Reading: