TTCVid - Understanding the Brain torrent

Understanding the Brain
(36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 1580

Taught by Jeanette Norden
Vanderbilt University
Ph.D., Vanderbilt University






As you read this, your brain is alive with activity: directing the movement of your eyes, decoding the electrical impulses on your retina, recognizing the pattern of words in these sentences and extracting their meaning, and also controlling your breath, heart rate, and body temperature, adjusting your posture, screening out the buzz of background stimuli, and performing countless other tasks, some voluntary, most not.

Everything you hear, feel, see, and think—everything that goes on inside your body and every interaction you have with the outside world—is controlled by your brain. It allows you to cope masterfully with your everyday environment. It is also capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights. But its most amazing achievement may be that it can understand itself.

How Does the Brain Do It?

This course, Understanding the Brain, takes you inside this astonishingly complex organ to show you how it works. Recent decades have seen unparalleled advances in understanding how the brain does what it does. Today we can pinpoint the specific regions, or nuclei, where some of life’s most mysterious processes take place, including:

* Where light that enters the eye is converted into the subjective experience of sight
* Where pressure waves that reach the ear are processed into sound
* Where fear originates
* Which nuclei are involved in language and the ability to read
* Where the ineffable chemistry of love is kindled.

Experience Your Own Brain with Awe and Excitement

As a researcher, Professor Jeanette Norden has participated in this ongoing scientific revolution. She is also a nationally recognized educator, singled out as one of the most effective teachers in America in What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain. Among Dr. Norden’s special qualities cited in the book is this simple but highly effective approach: “Before she begins the first class in any semester, she thinks about the awe and excitement she felt the first time anyone explained the brain to her, and she considers how she can help her students achieve that same feeling.”

You will share her consuming passion in these 36 lively and fascinating lectures, which Professor Norden has designed specifically for those without a background in science. “All you need to bring is your own brain and a desire to learn,” she says. Thus equipped, you will explore a broad range of topics in neuroscience.

Our insights into the functioning of the brain often come from cases where something has gone wrong, such as strokes, tumors, injuries, neurological diseases, and mental illness—pathologies that vividly demonstrate the distinct roles played by the various affected regions. Professor Norden provides an intriguing presentation of these cases, while giving you renewed empathy for those with these debilitating conditions. Above all, you will come away from the course with a deeper understanding of the intricate pathways of neural activity—together with a feeling of wonder that, most of the time, the brain manages its multifaceted mission just fine.

Know Your Mind

The ancient Egyptians believed that the brain has nothing to do with thought, sensation, and nervous activity—an outlook that shows the difficulty of accepting that something important is going on inside our heads. But if you know what to look for, you can observe specific aspects of your brain in action:

* Vision: The “now you see it, now you don’t” feeling you get when you see an illusion is your brain trying to interpret raw data from the eyes. Far from taking a picture of the world and sending it to the brain, the eyes actually transmit very little information. Vision is a construct created by the brain.
* Thought: Did you ever have trouble thinking after taking an antihistamine? It’s not surprising, since the antihistamine doesn’t just combat the effects of an allergy; it also blocks histamine as a neurotransmitter in the brain, altering your ability to think and process information.
* Motor skills: When you learn how to walk, ride a bicycle, knit, dance, or perform some other motor skill, you reach a point when all of a sudden you’re able to coordinate the new movement. That’s because a series of specialized cells in your brain’s cerebellum is now firing in unison.
* Social bonding: Your feeling of well-being with your spouse or among friends has a neurochemical basis. The neurotransmitter oxytocin is found in very high concentrations in the limbic systems of animals that socially bond. The more monogamous a species is, the higher the levels of oxytocin are in its members’ brains.
* Consciousness: Have you ever arrived at work with very little memory of the details of your journey? You were obviously not unconscious, but you were not fully self-aware either. Your brain was in “autopilot” mode, where it was in control without your being conscious of all that was happening around you.

Light Up Your Endogenous Reward System!

As humans, we have an enormous range of emotional responses that are mediated by our brains. In addition to the depths of depression, we are also capable of experiencing a true joie de vivre—thanks to our endogenous reward system. This subunit of the brain’s limbic system is considered responsible for the internal positive and even euphoric feelings we experience when engaging in activities as diverse as interacting with friends, reading a good book, or viewing a sunset. People who enjoy learning have these areas stimulated when they take a course such as this one!

So reward yourself! The good news is that our brains are incredibly plastic, which means that we continue to learn from our experiences at any age in ways that enrich our lives.

Please Note:

These lectures are intended to increase the understanding of the structure and function of the human brain. They are in no way designed to be used as medical references for the diagnosis or treatment of medical illnesses or trauma. Neither The Teaching Company nor Dr. Norden can be held responsible for any result derived from the use of this material. Questions of diagnosis or treatment of medical conditions should be brought to the attention of qualified medical personnel.


Available Exclusively on DVD

Because of the visual nature of the subject matter, this course is available only on DVD. It contains hundreds of images, animations, and on-screen text that support the professor\'s explanation of how our brains function.

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