Travelling around Editorial

A foundational background in neuroscience has become a significant component of a wellrounded education in the field of psychology. In fact, in the last decades, progress in both modern psychology and neuroscience led to an increasing overlap between both fields, as evidenced not only by its incorporation in several academic psychology graduate and postgraduate programs but also by the interdisciplinary work connecting both disciplines. Our lab, through its resources (human, techniques, etc.) is greatly contributing to the pedagogical projects of our school and it is also providing an important body of knowledge that overlaps with other disciplines under the roof of basic psychological science. Furthermore, our research also extends to a large number of interdisciplinary problems involving fundamental mechanisms underlying different neuropsychiatric diseases as we are also at the interface between basic research and clinical applications, which is strongly supported and stimulated by our school. In fact, neuroscience and psychology go hand in hand, fostering an important collaborative framework that allows a better and deeper understanding of the psychological phenomena, and providing a combined approach to the comprehension of mind through behavioral experiments and its underlying brain mechanisms. This has been framed, for example in the Division 6 of the American Psychological Association Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology. As V.S. Ramachandran opines on psychology’s and neuroscience’s intertwined future (Do psychologists have ‘neuron envy’?, Monitor on Psychology, June 2008, Vol 39, No. 6) he proposes that we can have an explanation in biology at two different levels: one is a “black box” and the other is going one step below and ask “What are the component parts and how do they interact to produce these phenomena?”. So, he compares the relationship between neuroscience and psychology as the Mendelian genetics and the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Lastly, he also states that “neuroscience will make psychology much more scientific, with more predictive power--leading to a deeper understanding of mental phenomena than psychology could achieve on its own”. PhD Defences