Abstract: This summer course introduces one of the outstanding problems of biology for the 21st century: how does our brain explore the world around us and exploit this knowledge through voluntary behavior. Today we can begin to see the outlines of its solution – a brain functional architecture to acquire, represent and express knowledge through the construction and execution of purposive behavioral plans of perception and action. Relating insights from psychology and neuroscience with formal theories of learning and reasoning, topics include: cerebral organization and function; brain activity and functional imaging; neural and cognitive development; theories of goal-directed planning and behavior; psychology and neuroscience of memory and learning; theories of consciousness; cognitive and neurolinguistics; disorders of thought and language; issues of medicine, public health and education for the brain sciences.
Prerequisites: Students come to the brain sciences from a variety of backgrounds, interests and educational goals. This course is no exception. If you are already partly knowledgeable about psychology or neuroscience, you will be challenged to extend and apply what you know to questions of brain architecture and function. But if this is your first class on these subjects, you will see how questions of brain functional architecture lead naturally upward to cognitive and behavioral psychology, and downward to cellular and molecular neurobiology.
Requirements: The three basic requirements of this course are
- reading and comprehension of materials presented in lectures and textbook assignments
- participation in class activities designed to assess and consolidate your learning
- group projects
- individual quizzes
- seminar discussions
- writing a term paper on a recent journal article in neuroscience
Grading: Because of the range of student backgrounds, majors and levels of experience, grading will be based on your effort and progress toward individualized learning goals. In particular, I hope to see evidence that you have challenged yourself to significantly increase your understanding of brain sciences over the term.
| MONDAY | TUESDAY | THURSDAY | FRIDAY | |
| 10:00-11:15 | Lecture | Lecture | Lecture | Lecture |
| 11:15-11:45 | Project | Quiz | Project | Quiz |
| 11:45-12:30 | Film | Film | Seminar | Seminar |
Hermann’s Grid
Neuron- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- Nature Neuroscience
- The young and the reckless
- Preso1, mGluR5 and the machinery of pain
- Reward and punishment illuminated
- Squaring cortex with color
- The best of times, the worst of times for psychiatric disease
- Calbindin controls release probability in ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons
- Distinct roles for direct and indirect pathway striatal neurons in reinforcement
- Neurogenesis requires TopBP1 to prevent catastrophic replicative DNA damage in early progenitors
- An unconventional role for miRNA: let-7 activates Toll-like receptor 7 and causes neurodegeneration
- Preso1 dynamically regulates group I metabotropic glutamate receptors
- SUMOylation and phosphorylation of GluK2 regulate kainate receptor trafficking and synaptic plasticity
- Channel properties reveal differential expression of TARPed and TARPless AMPARs in stargazer neurons
- Hepatocyte growth factor mediates mesenchymal stem cell–induced recovery in multiple sclerosis models
- Visual neurotransmission in Drosophila requires expression of Fic in glial capitate projections
- Contribution of visual and circadian neural circuits to memory for prolonged mating induced by rivals
- Large-scale cortical correlation structure of spontaneous oscillatory activity
- Rac1 is essential in cocaine-induced structural plasticity of nucleus accumbens neurons
- Activation of adult-born neurons facilitates learning and memory
- Gating and control of primary visual cortex by pulvinar
- Nonlinear analysis of macaque V1 color tuning reveals cardinal directions for cortical color processing
- Nature Reviews Neuroscience
- Neurogenetics: Unravelling the genetics of autism
- Neurodevelopmental disorders: Reversing the fragile X phenotype
- Brain–machine interfaces: Restoring movement in a paralysed hand
- Neurodegenerative disorders: Transplanted photoreceptors see the light
- Addiction: RAC1 signalling remodels dendrites
- Gene expression: Profiling expression in the human cortex
- Depression: Biomarker discovery
- Neuronal circuits: Social status defines circuits
- Neurotransmission: Autophagy regulates transmission
- Sensory systems: Great (taste) expectations
- Learning and memory: piRNA-regulated memory?
- Neurodegenerative disease: The pyroglutamylated seed
- Neurodegenerative disease: The interneuron link
- Deep molecular diversity of mammalian synapses: why it matters and how to measure it
- Regulation of neuronal GABAB receptor functions by subunit composition
- Apoptotic and non-apoptotic roles of caspases in neuronal physiology and pathophysiology
- The origin of extracellular fields and currents — EEG, ECoG, LFP and spikes
- The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain
- Insights into CNS ageing from animal models of senescence
- Neurodegenerative disease: The stress of misfolding
- J Cognitive Neuroscience
- Response Suppression by Automatic Retrieval of Stimulus–Stop Association: Evidence from Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
- When Less Is More: Evidence for a Facilitative Cathodal tDCS Effect in Attentional Abilities
- Task-relevant and Task-irrelevant Dimensions Are Modulated Independently at a Task-irrelevant Location
- Multiple Cognitive Abilities from a Single Cortical Algorithm
- Effects of Category Learning on Neural Sensitivity to Non-native Phonetic Categories
- Both the Middle Temporal Gyrus and the Ventral Anterior Temporal Area Are Crucial for Multimodal Semantic Processing: Distortion-corrected fMRI Evidence for a Double Gradient of Information Convergence in the Temporal Lobes
- Differential Brain Activity during Emotional versus Nonemotional Reversal Learning
- Hippocampal–Prefrontal Engagement and Dynamic Causal Interactions in the Maturation of Children's Fact Retrieval
- Moral Values Are Associated with Individual Differences in Regional Brain Volume
- White Matter Structure Changes as Adults Learn a Second Language
- Dopamine Agonists and the Suppression of Impulsive Motor Actions in Parkinson's Disease
- The Phenomenology of Error Processing: The Dorsal ACC Response to Stop-signal Errors Tracks Reports of Negative Affect
- Reward Modulation of Hippocampal Subfield Activation during Successful Associative Encoding and Retrieval
- Inducing Negative Affect Increases the Reward Value of Appetizing Foods in Dieters
- Neural Correlates of People's Hypercorrection of Their False Beliefs
- Rules Rule! Brain Activity Dissociates the Representations of Stimulus Contingencies with Varying Levels of Complexity
- A Sensorimotor Network for the Bodily Self
- Paying Attention through Eye Movements: A Computational Investigation of the Premotor Theory of Spatial Attention
- The Context–Object–Manipulation Triad: Cross Talk during Action Perception Revealed by fMRI
- A Meta-analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Self- and Other Judgments Reveals a Spatial Gradient for Mentalizing in Medial Prefrontal Cortex
- Neuropsychology
- APOE ε4 and cognitive function in early life: A meta-analysis.
- Executive functions in girls with ADHD followed prospectively into young adulthood.
- Auditory working memory impairments in individuals at familial high risk for schizophrenia.
- Predictors of postconcussive symptoms 3 months after mild traumatic brain injury.
- Cognitive predictors of academic achievement in young children 1 year after traumatic brain injury.
- Where are my hands? Influence of limb posture on tactile extinction.
- Mechanisms of attention in reading parafoveal words: A cross-linguistic study in children.
- Inhibitory control in young adolescents: The role of sex, intelligence, and temperament.
- Individual variability in speed of information processing: An index of cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis.
- The organization and anatomy of narrative comprehension and expression in Lewy body spectrum disorders.
- Mnemonic strategy training improves memory for object location associations in both healthy elderly and patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A randomized, single-blind study.
- Ideational fluency as a domain of human cognition.
- Psychological Review
- Temporal clustering and sequencing in short-term memory and episodic memory.
- Multidimensional vector model of stimulus–response compatibility.
- Psychological entropy: A framework for understanding uncertainty-related anxiety.
- Robust decision making in a nonlinear world.
- The burden of social proof: Shared thresholds and social influence.
- Correction to MacCoun (2012).
- Predictions about bisymmetry and cross-modal matches from global theories of subjective intensities.
- The planning and control model (PCM) of motorvisual priming: Reconciling motorvisual impairment and facilitation effects.
- Behavioral variability of choices versus structural inconsistency of preferences.
- Competition and cooperation among similar representations: Toward a unified account of facilitative and inhibitory effects of lexical neighbors.
- Optimal foraging in semantic memory.
