Learn how to understand your brain

The University of Chicago is conducting an online course called "Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life". This 10-week-long course will commence from 28th April, 2014. You can earn a verified certificate at the end of the course.

About the course:
The Neurobiology of Everyday Life is a 10-week course intended for anyone interested in how the nervous system works. The course will cover three main topics: neuroanatomy, neural communication, and neural systems. You will explore the overall organisation of the human brain and the cellular building blocks of the brain - neurons. You will examine how the incredibly complex brain develops from a ball of embryonic cells and then look at the anatomy of nerves, the spinal cord, brainstem and forebrain. An understanding of how blood reaches the brain, the blood brain barrier, and the ventricular system will be used to understand different types of strokes. At the end of the units on neuroanatomy, students will have a strong understanding of nerve injury, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, stroke, and brain tumours.

In the neural communication module, you will look at how electrical potentials carry information within neurons and how neurotransmitters are used to communicate information between neurons. This module will illuminate what goes wrong in epilepsy, demyelinising diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and myasthenia gravis as well as how nerve gas, Botox, cocaine and beta-blockers act on neurons.

In the final module, all of the fundamental anatomy and physiology from the first two modules will be used to examine how

1) we perceive the outside world;

2) we act in the world either volitionally or emotionally;

3) our nervous system allows us to live; and

4) cognition works to make us the human individuals that we are. You will look at the neurobiology of everyday situations such as multitasking (walking and chewing gum) and at the ways in which the nervous system commonly fails us (e.g. motion sickness). Students will emerge from this module with an understanding of common medical problems such as Parkinson's disease, myopia, hearing loss, and fever.

Peggy Mason will be the course instructor.

The course will have a workload of 4-6 hours of work / week.

It will be taught in English and the subtitles will be available in English.

Click here for more details and to register for free.

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