6 courses with the subject NEUR B, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
NEUR B100INTRODUCTION TO NEUROSCIENCE1.0
Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the structure and functions of the nervous system. This course includes topics on the broad history of behavioral neuroscience, parts of the nervous system, and a cursory overview of imaging/recording/histology. We also cover basic neurophysiology/chemistry of action potentials and neurotransmission (with some neurobiology of drug effects). Lastly, we explore sensorimotor processing (i.e. reflex arcs), basic sensory transduction and neuroanatomy of perception (sensory pathways from periphery to primary sensory cortex). Prerequisite(s): This course is not open to students who have previously taken HC Psych 217, HC Psych 260, or BMC Psych 218
Why do we see colors that aren't really there? How do we recognize a voice across a noisy room? Why does food taste different when we can't smell it? Sensation and Perception takes up these questions and many others, offering a rigorous scientific account of how the brain makes sense of the world. A central feature of this course is that students encounter perceptual phenomena firsthand before we work out the underlying neuroscience together. Through in-class demonstrations and interactive exercises, including visual and auditory illusions and hands-on experiments, students will experience the limits of their own perceptual systems in real time. Drawing on psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience, the course surveys perception across all the major sensory modalities. Students will come away with a deeper understanding of how experience arises from neural activity, and why the gap between the physical world and our perception of it is wider, and more fascinating, than it seems.
This course introduces students to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), one of the most powerful tools available for studying human brain function. Students learn to evaluate the strengths and limitations of fMRI relative to other neuroimaging methods, and gain hands-on experience working with real fMRI datasets. Using FSL, a widely used neuroimaging software package, students move through the full scientific process: reviewing existing literature, formulating a testable hypothesis, analyzing data, interpreting results, and writing up findings in standard APA format. No prior experience with neuroimaging is required. This is a .5 unit writing-intensive class that meets half of the writing requirement in the major.
This course will survey empirical studies from several subdisciplines within the field of neuroscience (eg behavioral, cognitive, computational, molecular, etc) that advance our understanding of the brain. Through exposure to a diversity of approaches, it is hoped that students will be reminded that the boundaries that define the disciplines of neuroscience are blurred, and that it is the language of all these subdisciplines, that continue the advance of modern neuroscience. Each section of the course (defined by a given subdiscipline and relevant empirical articles) will culminate with a visit from a current researcher in that subdiscipline whose studies continue to advance our understanding of the brain. The visiting researcher will lead an in-class discussion about their research, as well as the path they took to get to their current position.
Laboratory or field research on a wide variety of topics. Students should consult with faculty members to determine their topic and faculty supervisor, early in the semester prior to when they will begin.
