The human brain is the crown jewel of a millions-year-long evolutionary process. Many brains have tried, and many have failed, and now we are here. For the fist time in the history of life on Earth, an object has been created that has the capacity to study itself. If your brain is interested, it can peer back on itself, in this neuroscience class. We will learn about what the brains of neuroscientists have discovered about brains in general. What are brains made of? How do brains do computation? How do we see, hear, taste, etc? How do we remember? None of these questions have been 'completely' answered by scientists, but the early findings are surprising and interesting. We will walk you through a tiny fraction of what is known about neuroscience today, and help you understand the experiments that are being done as the field moves forward.

The brain is a dynamic circuit of millions of neurons connected to one another. At this very moment, many of them are currently rewiring themselves to process this sentence you are reading. What is learning? This class will invite you to learn about a process that is essentially responsible for what you remember, what you know and who you are. We will learn about the basic neuroscience behind the process of learning, as well as discuss recent research and how this applies to current events.

How does the brain work? The field of neuroscience has really just begun to unravel the mystery of how our mental worlds arise from these three-pound organs; but many surprises have already been uncovered. We all take our ability to sense and manipulate the world for granted, but these abilities have been growing and evolving through intermediate states for millions of years. In our Introduction to Neuroscience class, we will learn experimental and theoretical insights into how people and animals ercieve the world, how we learn, how we think, and how we control our movement. We will discuss the evolutionary roots of the brain, and we will try to tackle some philosophical issues pertaining to consciousness and free will. You will also learn about what happens when brain circuitry goes bad: in Parkonson's disease, Alzheimer's dimentia, and dyslexia, for example; and how our own brains 'go bad' in surprisingly common ways. At the end of the course, we will learn about how research in neuroscience is done by touring several MIT neuroscience laboratories, and we will conduct an (optional) sheep brain dissection to see first-hand how brains are organized.