Reddit and What I Found There

Reddit is a great place for people to voice their opinions or ask controversial subjects. With so many subreddits, there is little that is not covered. People are opinionated and are not afraid to speak their mind. This will lead to many interesting discussions, providing perspective from various angles.


In r/neuroscience, there are three main types of threads that occur the most: discussion, article, and question. Like the twitter posts, a thread tagged with article will link to another website where a detailed article explains the subject. This makes up about 1/3 of the posts in r/neuroscience. The majority of the rest is made up of discussion and question posts. The main difference in the two is that a question post will have a very specific question that can usually be answered and the discussion posts are more open for interpretation. Often times the discussion will get theoretical. This theoretical area of discussions leads to many disagreements but never escalate to personal disputes. Most of the time the discussions stay respectful and productive.

One of the first discussion posts I clicked on provided great ideas that interested me. Here is the post. The post started with a question of, "does the brain have original (not based off experience) thoughts?" This question interested me because I learned last semester how important the experiences we have as children are in development. As I reviewed the main ideas of how our brain develops and behaves i could not think of a case where original thought exists. As I read through the comments I enjoyed following this collective train of thought as it evolved into a more complicated question, ending with quantum mechanics.

The second discussion post that resonated with me was more of a question post. The initial question had to do with how genes are turned on and off with epigenetics. I enjoyed this post because every commenter added something new to further help the person that posted the question understand. The first commenter left a long, detailed explanation of how genes are turned on and off. Then the next commenter expands on some aspect mentioned of the first comment. This repeats until almost no aspect of the question is unanswered. I was very impressed in the amount of effort people put into their comments, just to answer a random person's question.

I was not surprised with the kind of posts relating to actual neuroscience questions and articles. I expected to see a lot of factual information and hypothetical conversations. I did not, however, expect to see more personal posts. Every once in a while a post will come up asking for career or personal advice. I was also surprised to see how many users commented good, thought out advice.