Reddit and What I Found There

There are many forums through which people can discuss topics or ideas. And throughout the internet there are sites almost specifically for garnering discussions of a type, one such site is Reddit. To truly immerse myself in Reddit to see what discussions are happening in my field I searched through both the neuroscience threads and the cognitive science threads.

What's the Conversation About?
     As with the previous perusals of Twitter, many of the threads throughout Reddit are comprised of articles discussing the latest achievements or findings within the field. The discussions within the cognitive science thread are more dealing with behaviors, things like autism studies and depression news. While the Neuroscience thread has more discussions open and actually seems to be an official sort of thread, specific to "Neuroscience News", there is more of a small community feel and specific directed questions to discuss, not just articles.

ZEISS Microscopy. "Cultured Rat Hippocampal Neuron"
01/13/2016 via Flickr.Attribution 2.0 Generic

Read It and Was Fascinated
      From the Cognitive Science thread the thing that interested me most, while it may not be especially about cognitive science, was an article about what parents with successful children seem to have in common. While the article itself is not of the best quality, and in fact is dubious, the thread of comments produced on Reddit is more interesting. The commenters seem most concerned with debunking the source or making fun of what the article has delineated.
     The Neuroscience thread was much smaller in scope and had more single questions with answers instead of articles that were commented on and I found these to be more interesting. Like the thread on the study of consciousness, that only had a couple answers to it but were well worded and did present intriguing ideas for the original poster of the thread to consider. I found it interesting because consciousness is a more fascinating subject than most in my opinion.

Impressionists:
     While the people in the forum of Reddit were not talking the way I expected the people of my field to speak in, it was how I expected to find Reddit. Within the more specific neuroscience page it seemed more of the culture I have come to expect from within my field of study, not as general or open to public; only those with a very specific interest would visit these threads.