Sioux Falls Feminists endorse The Neuroscience of Everyday Life
for showing how decisions, memory, willpower, religion and
spirituality all arise from the workings of the neurons, synapses,
neurotransmitters, and other processes in our brain.

The Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Lectures by Professor Sam Wang

The Neuroscience of Everyday Life (2010) - 36 lectures, 18 hours
The Neuroscience of Everyday Life at TheGreatCourses.com

Your nervous system is you. All the thoughts, perceptions, moods, passions, and dreams that make you an active, sentient being are the work of this amazing network of cells. For many centuries, people knew that this was true. But no one was sure how it happened.

Now, thanks to the exciting new field of neuroscience, we can chart the workings of the brain and the rest of the nervous system in remarkable detail to explain how neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, and other biological processes produce all the experiences of everyday life, in every stage of life. From the spectacular growth of the brain in infancy to the act of learning a skill, falling in love, getting a joke, revising an opinion, or even forgetting a name, something very intriguing is going on behind the scenes.

For example, groundbreaking research in the past few decades is now able to explain such phenomena as these:

Decisions: Studies of decision making at the level of neurons show that our brain has often committed to a course of action before we are aware of having made a decision - an apparent violation of our sense of free will.

Memory: Memory is composed of many systems located in different parts of the brain, which means that you can forget your car keys (information stored in the neocortex) but still remember how to drive (a learned skill requiring the striatum and cerebellum).

Willpower: Willpower is more than a metaphor; it's a measurable trait that draws on a finite mental resource, like a muscle. While any given individual has a consistent willpower capacity throughout life, it can be strengthened through training - again, just like a muscle.

Religion and spirituality: Three mental traits appear to be essential for the development of organized religion: the search for causes and effects, the ability to reason about people and motives, and language. Mystical experiences also trace to specific activities of the brain.

Opening your eyes to how neural processes produce the familiar features of human existence, The Neuroscience of Everyday Life covers a remarkable range of subjects in 36 richly detailed lectures. You will explore the brain under stress and in love, learning, sleeping, thinking, hallucinating, and just looking around - which is less about recording reality than creating illusions that allow us to function in our environment.

Professor Sam Wang is Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. A renowned researcher in the field of neuroscience, he is the coauthor of the bestselling book Welcome to Your Brain, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Professor Wang's scholarship and advancements in neuroscience have won him numerous honors, including a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

36 Lectures - 30 minutes each

The Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Lectures by Professor Sam Wang

Sioux Falls Feminists endorse The Neuroscience of Everyday Life
for showing how decisions, memory, willpower, religion and
spirituality all arise from the workings of the neurons, synapses,
neurotransmitters, and other processes in our brain.