CoursesCourse 11
Cognitive neuroscience: what the brain does with the world
The brain does not copy the world; it interprets it, and it keeps changing as it does. This course looks inside the head: how expectation shapes what we see, what injuries and scanners can and cannot tell us about reason and emotion, whether a child is settled at three, and what we do to the brain we keep.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Seeing what we expectTwo circles that are the same size, a triangle that is not there, and a Victorian detective. How the brain builds what we see out of what we already know, why that makes us biased, and what actually helps.
- 2 Windows into the working brainA man who could no longer make new memories, a railway foreman and an iron bar, and the scanners that came after. What injuries and images can show about memory, emotion, and self-control, and what they cannot.
- 3 Settled at three, or made by what comes after?A classical-music CD for every newborn in Georgia, children raised in institutions, a gene with a bad nickname. What the early years really do to the brain, and why neither 'everything is decided by three' nor 'it never matters' is true.
- 4 The brain you keepMonkeys, violinists, taxi drivers, and jugglers show that the adult brain keeps changing. What practice, sleep, and movement can do, what brain-training games have not done, and the brain myths worth dropping.
You’ll be able to
- Explain why perception is the brain's interpretation rather than a recording, and say what research on implicit bias does and does not show.
- Describe how injuries and brain scans taught us about memory, emotion, and reasoning, and name the limits of a brain-scan image.
- Say what the research does support in the claim that the first years matter, and where it has been stretched too far, including the 'first three years' idea.
- Describe how the adult brain changes with practice, what has and has not held up in studies of new neurons, brain training, sleep, and exercise, and spot common brain myths.
About this course
This course covers 认知神经科学, cognitive neuroscience: the study of how the brain produces perception, memory, emotion, and choice. It continues from Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, which described the mind's shortcuts. Here we look at the organ behind them. Where Course 9, Sex, love, and romantic relationships, asked where our wants come from, this course asks what the brain does with the world, and what the world does to the brain.
The argument and examples lead. Around them we add the primary research behind each claim, background for readers outside China, and hands-on activities. Brain science is a field where popular accounts routinely run ahead of the evidence, so each lesson says plainly which findings are well established, which are contested, and which did not hold up when other laboratories tried them again. Where a popular retelling differs from the published study, we use the published study.