Goals
     As with all laboratory exercises, a primary goal is to give you hands on experience with the phenomena that you hear about in lecture.  In addition, this laboratory is designed to involve you in the planning and analysis of experiments.  Therefore, most of the semester is dedicated to small-group independent projects.  The goal of this is to develop your analytical and critical thinking skills.  Rather than being given a detailed procedure that will lead you to some expected result, you have to decide what to test, how to design the experiment, how to analyze the data, and how to summarize and present your results.  These activities develop thinking skills that will help you in any field.  In addition, because you have to make many of the decisions, you will learn much more about the topic that you study than if you just follow someone else's directions.

Layout of the semester
     The focus of the semester will be the independent projects.  To prepare for these, most students find it helpful to have some guidance at the beginning of the semester.  Thus, the first four weeks will involve guided experimentation.  You will do standard laboratory experiments on four of the classic physiological systems (reflexes, nerve recordings, muscle contractions, and respiration).  The goal of this section is to familiarize you with these systems and teach you useful experimental methods.  During these experiments, you will be given progressively more responsibility for deciding what to do and how to do it.  With this background, you will be able to design your own project studying one of these systems in greater detail.
     After the first four weeks, the rest of the semester will be dedicated to two major independent projects.  You will work in groups of two or three.  Once the projects begin, you do not have to work during the scheduled lab hours.  Many groups prefer to schedule their work around the times that they can most easily get subjects.  The advantage of working during scheduled hours is that you know I will be there to help if you need it.  I will also be available at other times to discuss your project and help you troubleshoot problems.  At the end of each project, each group will write a paper and give an informal seminar to the class.
     There will be one required laboratory exercise between the two projects.  The point of this is to introduce you to a number of other experimental systems and techniques that you could use in the second project.  Typically the second projects cover a wider range of topics than the first, and they are often more creative.

The computer stations
 Most of our experiments involve recording data electronically from real systems (animal or human), and transferring it to the computer.
 The advantages of electronic data collection are:
      1) it is precise
      2) you can collect a lot of data rapidly
      3) you can send this data to a computer for analysis.
 The advantages of using computers are that they can:
      1) control the precision and duration of data collection
      2) display, mathematically manipulate, and analyze data in a wide variety of ways
      3) store lots of data
      4) send precise outputs to initiate experiments

Thus, the computer stations give us power and flexibility.  This is critical, because the laboratory is designed for maximum flexibility.  I want you to be able to quantitatively test any hypotheses that you can create.

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