RE: The code that is DNA
December 28, 2019 at 1:24 pm
(This post was last modified: December 28, 2019 at 2:33 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(December 28, 2019 at 1:00 pm)LastPoet Wrote: Breezy, is biology in the curriculum for psychologists where you live?
Depends on what aspect of psychology you are specialising in; every student in my school graduating from psychology needs to take a course on the biological aspects of behavior at the very least.
Psychology is a very invasive field, meaning it requires interdisciplinary knowledge of other branches in order to be studied coherently. An introductory course on perception, for example (also required by my school), begins with a physical analysis of light, followed by the chemical interactions in photoreceptor, followed by a neurological understanding of the pathways in the brain, until finally you're able to tackle the psychological aspects of perception.
That isn't always the case for other fields of science. I recently took a course on human cognition which was mandatory for me but an elective for neuroscience students. As the semester went on I started to notice that the psychology students could understand what the neuroscience students were saying, but that neuroscience students were very unfamiliar with what psychology students where saying. The curiosity eventually got to me and I asked the class/professor about it. It turns out that yes, neuroscience gets taught to psychologists in varying degrees, but not a lot of psychology is taught to neuroscientists.
I've since noticed that's it's a hierarchy thing. A chemists doesn't need to know much beyond chemistry. A biologist learns chemistry when learning biology. A neuroscientist learns chemistry and biology when leaning neuroscience. And a psychologist learns all of the below in varying degrees when learning psychology.
It's all very interesting how fields are built on one another.
Edit: I just looked up the curriculum and yes, it looks like Biology is a prerequisite for psych students at my school; I probably didn't notice because I had already taken biology before transferring to psychology. Its also worth noting that if you take a course on evolutionary psychology you're simultaneously learning evolutionarily biology.
