9.13 - The Human Brain: Introduction Lecture

Instructor

Background: Bob, a friend of Nancy Kanwisher, experienced a sudden medical emergency while staying over at her house.
Incident: Bob fell and was unresponsive; after waking up, EMTs couldn’t find anything wrong and allowed the professor to drive Bob to the ER.
Hospital Visit: Various tests showed nothing; however, based on some past worrying signs, Nancy suggested checking Bob's brain.
Signs: Bob had difficulty navigating and recognizing places despite being highly functional otherwise. He had shown signs of getting lost even in familiar places.
Discovery: An MRI revealed a growing mass (size of a lime) in Bob’s brain near a region involved in navigation (para hippocampal place area).
Past MRI: Earlier scans showed a smaller mass (size of a grape), indicating it was growing slowly, which was somewhat reassuring.
Diagnosis: A meningioma (non-cancerous tumor) that needed removal because of its size.
Surgery: Successful removal by a top neurosurgeon; however, Bob did not regain his navigational abilities post-surgery.
Aftermath: Bob now relies on GPS for navigation due to permanent navigational deficits, though other spatial abilities remain intact.

Brain Structure & Function: The brain has specific, localized functions.
Specialized Brain Areas: Some parts of the brain handle very specific tasks; for Bob, the area affecting navigation was damaged.
Recovery from Brain Damage: Recovery depends on the age and which area of the brain is impacted.
Importance of Expertise: The benefit of having access to specialized medical knowledge and the best professionals.

Self-Knowledge: Understanding the brain is understanding ourselves; the brain is central to identity and function.
Limits of Human Knowledge: By studying the brain, we can understand the limits of human cognition and knowledge systems.
Advancing AI: Insights from brain studies can significantly contribute to advancements in artificial intelligence, especially in areas like deep learning and neural networks.
Intellectual Challenge: It's one of the greatest intellectual challenges, unlocking the mysteries of mind and consciousness.

Deep Nets: Recent advancements in AI, especially deep learning, have revolutionized fields like object recognition, but still fall short of human-level cognition in many respects.
AI challenges: Current AI systems struggle with more complex image understanding and generalize less effectively to new types of data compared to humans.

Levels of Study: Ranging from molecules and individual neurons to whole brain regions and networks of regions.
Mind-Brain Relationship: Focus on how mental functions arise from brain activity.
Methods: Use of multiple methods from cognitive science and neuroscience to study mental functions and their neural substrates.
- Psychophysics: Behavioral observations and perceptual experiments.
- Neuropsychology: Studying brain-damaged patients to understand preserved and lost functions.
- Functional MRI (fMRI): Brain imaging to see active brain regions during tasks.
- Neurophysiology: Recording from neurons in animals and occasionally humans.
- EEG & MEG: Electrical and magnetic recordings from the scalp.
- Connectivity Measures: Analyzing brain region connections using methods like diffusion tractography.

Goals: Understanding big questions in the field, how different methods contribute to knowledge, and gaining ability to read current papers.
Structure: The course will blend cognitive science with neuroscience, focusing not just on the biological side but also on mental functions.
Grading:
- Midterm: 25%
- Final: 25%
- Reading and writing assignments: Approx. 2 papers/week, with short written responses frequently required.
- Quizzes: Brief in-class quizzes via Google forms (~8 quizzes in total).
- Longer written assignment: Designing an experiment.
Prerequisite Knowledge:
- Basic understanding of stats and neuroanatomy is assumed.

Questions to Ask: Determine the question, design, finding, and interpretation of the paper.
Methods: Understand the methods and analyses used, but detailed technical aspects (e.g., specific MRI parameters) can often be skimmed.

Review Lectures: For students new to the material, review lectures on prerequisite contents are available.

Quiz Dates: First quiz on February 20th.

End of Lecture Notes Human Brain Introduction