Foundations of Brain & Behavior, taught properly
Every lecture and study guide so far — rebuilt with intuition, the mechanism drawn out, interactive figures you can break, and exam-shaped problems with the steps hidden until you want them. Built for Midterm 1.
The slides are mostly pictures with labels, and the study guides are lists of terms. Neither shows you why Parkinson's reduces movement while Huntington's increases it, why the Hermann grid has grey dots, or why a double dissociation rules out a serial model. Several exit-ticket questions ("how would you test this?", "why does the scene move the other way?") are asked and never answered.
This guide answers all of them. Every chapter starts from something concrete, gives the mechanism a figure you can play with, states the definitions precisely, and ends with quizzes whose wrong answers are the common misconceptions. Where the study guide and the slides disagree, it says so.
The midterm
| Date | Lecture | In this guide |
|---|---|---|
| 8/24 | 1 · Course intro | Ch. 1 |
| 8/26 | 2 · Neuroanatomy & neurophysiology | Ch. 2, Ch. 3 |
| 8/31 | 3 · Brain dissection, Marr, Tinbergen | Ch. 3, Ch. 4 |
| 9/2 | 4 · Dysfunctional brain I | Ch. 4, Ch. 5 |
| 9/9 | 5 · Dysfunctional brain II | Ch. 6, Ch. 7 |
| 9/14 | 6 · Imaging & perturbing the brain | Ch. 7, Ch. 8 |
| 9/16 | 7 · Vision I | Ch. 8, Ch. 9 |
| 9/21 | 8 · Vision II | Ch. 10, Ch. 11 |
| 9/23 | 9 · Vision III | Ch. 11, Ch. 12 |
| 9/28 | 10 · Vision IV — colour & the two pathways | Ch. 13 |
| 9/30 | 11 · NeuroAI (guest: Dr. Maggie Henderson) | Ch. 14 |
| 10/5 | 12 · Hearing & sound | Ch. 15 |
| — | Speech, music & language | After the midterm — not in scope |
| 10/7 | Midterm exam (25% of the grade) | |
Midterm practice
Exam-shaped problems mixing chapters: every study-guide "benefits and limitations" question, dissociation tables, lesion localization, basal-ganglia cases, and vision mechanisms.
One-page cheat sheet
Every definition, pathway and number from Lectures 1–9, compressed. For checking yourself the night before — not for learning from.
Part I — Foundations
Why study brain & behavior
Change blindness and Shepard's tone (both runnable), the five reasons, the three disciplines, a lesionable dual-route reading model, and why active learning feels worse but works better.
Neurons, spikes & synapses
Cell and neuron types, an action-potential simulator that shows frequency coding, a synapse you can dose with Parkinson's and depression drugs, and the three kinds of plasticity.
Organizing & dissecting the brain
The six cortical layers (with the L3 correction), directions and planes you can slice, the four ways to divide the brain, meninges and the dissection views.
Marr, Tinbergen & representations
Three levels and four questions with worked examples, a paintable Sobel edge detector, the paper-folding and mountain-climber problems, mental rotation, and the priming demos.
Part II — The dysfunctional brain
Neuropsychology & dissociations
Controls, ceiling and floor effects (with a slider that hides a real deficit), single vs double dissociation, and exactly why the double one rules out a serial model.
Stroke, aphasia & head trauma
Arterial territories, vessel failures, ischemic vs hemorrhagic stroke, Broca's vs Wernicke's, coup–contrecoup vs diffuse axonal injury, and CTE.
Neurodegeneration & basal ganglia
A delayed-feedback model of ataxia, a go/no-go circuit simulator for Parkinson's, L-dopa, DBS and Huntington's, and Alzheimer's memory dissociations.
Part III — Methods
Part IV — Vision
The eye, retina & pathway
Camera obscura tradeoffs, rods and cones, the blind spot, Troxler fading, and a lesion simulator for every point from retina to V1.
LGN, V1 & receptive fields
Magno vs parvo, V1's four properties, a live center–surround cell, the Hermann grid computed, orientation tuning and a population model of tilt adaptation.
Surfaces & depth
Border ownership, a Kanizsa triangle you can break, seven pictorial cues you switch on one at a time, the Ames room, vergence and disparity.
Motion
Apparent motion, segmentation by motion, a point-light walker, optic flow, MT/V5 evidence from four methods, and a real motion aftereffect.
Colour, V4 & the two pathways
Trichromacy and cone types, colour opponency, why illumination makes colour ambiguous, cerebral achromatopsia, and the dorsal/ventral double dissociation (patient DF vs optic ataxia).
Encoding, decoding & CNNs
Which way each model predicts, what a voxel is and isn't, convolution and kernels, layer-to-area correspondence, stimulus optimization, BCIs, and the ethics of brain decoding.
Hearing & sound
Cochlea to A1, tonotopy as a place code, sound constancy as the same inference problem as colour constancy, prediction in audition, and how to read a spectrogram.
How to use this guide
The callouts mean something:
going deeper marks material beyond the lectures — good for understanding, unlikely to be tested directly.
A plan for the 11 days before 10/7:
- One chapter a session. Do the quizzes before rereading anything.
- Play with each figure until you can predict what it'll do before you move the slider.
- Do Midterm practice closed-book; revisit the chapters behind anything you missed.
- Add Lectures 10–12 as they happen.
- Night before: the cheat sheet only.
Figures marked "reconstruction" or "schematic" were rebuilt because the slide images didn't survive text extraction — check them against the original slides before trusting exact details.