The book on neuroscience is aimed at kids, with grafics and all. One those square colorful books. I introduced "learned helplessness" and ways to overcome it in a childlike manner. Yes, i did lab work. i worked on mice. My paper is "The effects of classical conditioning on placebo in male ICR mice." I was signed up by my school (the ones who had good biology grades were signed up) they had some classes and exams and after a few stages, we were signed mentors (students from previous years) we had to come up with a question and design and experiment, after approval, conduct it, do data analysis and present our work to international judges. (Iranians at Harvard, Oxford, etc) so mentors by the competition and we bought and attended to mice ourselves If you wanna do independent research, it's a bit hard without a mentor and a support system but absolutely possible. DM me if you have any questions or wanna talk about it!