Introduction to Neuroscience (NEUR 201)

This course is an introductory survey of neuroscience from cells to behavior with an emphasis on the use of sensory input to guide action. The course is designed to provide the student with a basic but complete understanding of central nervous system anatomy and function. Every opportunity is taken to relate brain function to everyday experience in order to make the material more intuitive. Given the breadth of the field, a large amount of information is covered requiring a strong commitment on the part of the student.

Quantitative Methods (PSYC 120)

This course covers the basic quantitative methods and research design techniques that will provide a background to subsequent experimental courses. We will cover descriptive and inferential statistics, sampling, correlation, regression and prediction, power analysis, hypothesis testing and non-parametric procedures. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), a specialized software for statistical analysis will be introduced and employed during the course.

Psychopharmacology (PSYC 235)

This course is designed to provide the student with a comprehensive view of the effects of chemical compounds on brain processes and their correlated effects on behavior, cognition and emotion. The course covers basic principles, systems neuroscience from molecular to behavioral levels, drug abuse and addiction and pharmacological treatments of emotional disorders, neurodegeneration and psychopathology.

Art, Neuroscience and Consciousness (ART/NEUR 275)

To be taught Spring 2014

Physiological Psychology (PSYC 323)

This course is a high-level introduction to the physiological bases of psychological processes including emotion, motor control, learning and memory and cognition. The course deals with current debates on the nature of brain-mind relationships, neuroscience and law, the ontogeny of behavior and cognition, and the ethical issues surrounding modern neuroscientific knowledge.

Advanced Neuroscience (NEUR 410)- The Neural Bases of Creativity

Creativity is an interesting topic due to the enormous diversity of its end products. It is safe to say that there is very little in our modern life that is not touched by some aspect of human creativity, from the language we speak, to the traditions that affect what we eat, how we dress, how we behave socially and even our habits of mind.

Are humans the only animals that create? Can machines be creative? If evolution through Natural Selection is creative, then do we even need individual creators? How can a group of nerve cells be capable of Creativity? These are some of the topics that we will be discussing and attempt to clarify through readings, thought experiments and other “intuition pumps”.

The goal of this course is to explore the concept of Creativity and the numerous subprocesses that give rise to it. Furthermore, our specific objective will be to suggest the nature of the neural processes that underlie the Creative Process.