What is Biopsychology?
What is going on in your brain while you are reading these lines? How do your neurons coordinate your eye muscles to make swift saccades from one word on the screen to the next while other neurons glue the perceived visual pieces together to enable a complete scene to appear? Probably other cells of your brain are meanwhile busy active to inhibit somatosensory information to surpass your thalamus.Otherwise your attention would be directed to the fact that a special sensation is created by having your feet in your shoes (now, reading this, you suddenly feel your feet, don't you? I helped your somatosensory system to overcome thalamic inhibition). While all that is going on, groups of neurons in your cortex are activated in a chain-like fashion, forming a sequence of thoughts on the question where this text will lead you.
The fictive scenery presented above captures some of the themes biopsychologists are interested in. To make a long story short, biopsychology could be defined as a branch of psychology which investigates the biological aspects of psychological matters. The neural basis of learning, memory, and cognition (to name just a few) is as much a core aspect of biopsychology as are the evolutionary roots of human and animal behavior, and the hormonal basis of stress, hunger and sex.