What We Know About The Brain (And What We Don’t)
Jessica Payne is the Nancy O’Neill Collegiate Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab. Her course, The Sleeping Brain, routinely sports a waitlist because of its immense popularity among Notre Dame students. In 2012, Professor Payne received the Frank O’Malley Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is also a two-time recipient of the Distinction in Teaching Award, and won the Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center.
Overview
You are your brain, according to modern neuroscience, but how exactly do your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sense of self derive from this three-pound organ locked inside the black box of your skull? Scientists have been seeking answers to those questions for decades, and finding surprising answers in the brains of people with psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Join us on a journey deep into the brain, the mind, and the self, as Professor Jessica Payne reveals the startling and exciting recent findings of cutting-edge neuroscience. How does your brain accomplish spontaneous creativity? How much self-control or “free will” do we really have? And what does the future hold, once brains begin to integrate with “neural prosthetics”? Get to know your dynamic unconscious mind, a bigger part of “who you are” than you could ever guess.