The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness Course: A Free Online Course from Caltech

“This award-win­ning, nine unit course (The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness), taught in the spring of each year at Cal­tech, is con­cerned with the cor­re­lates of con­scious­ness in the brain. The course focus­es on the anato­my, phys­i­ol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy of sen­so­ry con­scious­ness in the mam­malian brain, in par­tic­u­lar visu­al per­cep­tion. Oth­er top­ics include coma and oth­er dis­tur­bances of con­scious­ness, clin­i­cal case stud­ies (e.g., prosopag­nosia, neglect), atten­tion, mem­o­ry, zom­bie sys­tems, free will and some philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions of inter­est to the stu­dent of con­scious­ness.

With the help of Leila Red­dy, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in the Koch lab­o­ra­to­ry, and Leslie Max­field and her team from Aca­d­e­m­ic Media Tech­nolo­gies at Cal­tech, these lec­tures have been filmed, edit­ed and put online.

They are orga­nized into 16 lec­tures, each about one hour. They fol­low the text­book by the lec­tur­er, Christof Koch (with much help from his close col­league and men­tor, Fran­cis Crick), “The Quest for Con­scious­ness — A Neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal Approach.” See each video’s “About” text for the lec­ture’s cor­re­spond­ing chap­ter or chap­ters.”

You can watch the videos all above, or on Youtube via this playlist.

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness will be added to our list of Free Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion.

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