I was a fuzzy-headed thinker before I found Biological Psychology.

Sadly, it’s true.

When I was in college, I wanted to change the world. Well, first I wanted to be rock-star famous. But after I gave up on that dream, I turned to psychology: you know, saving lives, healing psyches and jumping tall buildings in a single bound.

I switched from one wild dream to another because my thinking was more magical than logical. I envisioned lives miraculously changing without knowing what those changes would look like. I had the right emotion but the wrong mindset.

I learned that Bio Psych is absolutely fascinating. It’s all about how your body works. You learn how your brain works, how you feel emotions, how sleep helps your brain reboot, and why you’re hungry at the oddest times.

You explore the workings of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters. And you see how your body processes medications, handles stress and feels pain. It’s great because there’s nothing more interesting than you!

Some of my favorite topics:

• Why high blood pressure makes your brain more vulnerable to disease
• Why we know so much about your eye and so little about your pain
• Why brain surgery isn’t painful but seeing your dentist is
• Why it is better to get Huntington’s when you are old
• How to recognize the early warning signs of a stroke
• Why too much glutamate can kill you

I learned more than I intended or expected.

I learned a lot about what makes us tick: our anatomy, physiology, processes and genetic coding. But two things stuck with me over all these years.

First, I learned to think like a scientist. I discovered that psychology can be more than touchy-feely intuition. It can be more than empathy. Psychology can be finding new information that is critical to understanding ourselves. And that discovery changed my life. I came away from the class with a set of mental tools that I still use today. I learned the value of careful observation, clarifying your assumptions, and organizing your facts. And I used that knowledge in my master’s thesis on pupillary reactivity, doctoral dissertation on inductive reasoning, and many years of work as a researcher and consultant.

Second, I learned that challenges can be fun. You’re smarter than most people who study biological psychology because you’re searching for information about the topic and how to master it. You know this isn’t an easy class. You know that you’re not a simple organism. You’ve got a lot of moving parts and complex systems. Consequently, studying Biological Psychology is going to require time and effort. But if your experience is like mine, you’ll discover that conquering challenges is fun, and a habit forming.