Understanding the Brain

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 capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights. It also produces the enormous range of emotional responses that can take us from the depths of depression to the heights of euphoria.

Considering everything the brain does, how can this relatively small mass of tissue possibly be the source of our personalities, dreams, thoughts, sensations, utterances, and movements?

Understanding the Brain, a 36-lecture course by award-winning Professor Jeanette Norden of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, takes you inside this astonishingly complex organ and shows you how it works, from the gross level of its organization to the molecular level of how cells in the brain communicate. With its combination of neurology, biology, and psychology, this course will help you understand how we perceive the world through our senses, how we move, how we learn and remember, and how emotions affect our thoughts and actions.

Solving the Mystery of the Brain

The ancient Egyptians discarded the brain during mummification while carefully preserving other organs; to them, the brain was of no importance. Starting with the Greek physician Hippocrates, however, observers began tracing more and more of our sensory, nervous, and intellectual activities to the brain—and eventually to specific regions of the brain.

The brain is still a mystery in many respects—for example, we still are unsure as to how consciousness is generated—but recent decades have seen unparalleled advances in understanding how the brain does what it does. In the last 50 years, an explosion of knowledge about the brain's structure and function has occurred. Scientists have performed amazing research by using tools such as MRIs and PET scanning to get a better grasp on deciphering the mysteries of how this important organ works.

Due to these technological advances, we can now pinpoint:

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 is generated
which areas of the brain are involved in spoken and written language
where the deep chemistry of love is kindled


Look also:

Biology: The Science of Life

Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective

Brightstorm - Biology

Gold Standard MCAT Biology

The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food

Stress and Your Body

Origins of Life

Mysteries of the Microscopic World

Understanding the Human Body: ...tion to Anatomy and Physiology

Science of Self

Roots of Human Behavior

Major Transitions in Evolution

Darwinian Revolution

The Ancestor's Tale

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy