As you read this, your brain is alive with activity: directing the movement of your eyes, decoding the electrical impulses on your retina, recognizing the pattern of words in these sentences and extracting their meaning, and also controlling your breath, heart rate, and body temperature, adjusting your posture, screening out the buzz of background stimuli, and performing countless other tasks, some voluntary, most not.
Everything you hear, feel, see, and think—everything that goes on inside your body and every interaction you have with the outside world—is controlled by your brain. It allows you to cope masterfully with your everyday environment. It is also capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights. But its most amazing achievement may be that it can understand itself.

How Does the Brain Do It?

This course, Understanding the Brain, takes you inside this astonishingly complex organ to show you how it works. Recent decades have seen unparalleled advances in understanding how the brain does what it does. Today we can pinpoint the specific regions, or nuclei, where some of life’s most mysterious processes take place, including:

* Where light that enters the eye is converted into the subjective experience of sight
* Where pressure waves that reach the ear are processed into sound
* Where fear originates
* Which nuclei are involved in language and the ability to read
* Where the ineffable chemistry of love is kindled.