MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)
nancysbraintalks.mit.edu
nancysbraintalks.mit.edu
Of course, the content is insanely interesting. I am hooked like the first episode of Breaking Bad.
So often lecturers hide behind terminology to make a topic seem more impressive / complex. So thank you. Plus great to see that you're on here too!
Just finished the series on Face Recognition. I was wondering if the fusiform face area (FFA) get activated while thinking of someone's face instead of actually looking at one? Might also be interesting to explore the memory of faces in persons with prosopagnosia?
Haven't actuallly googled for these yet. Will do so in a bit.. after the next series of lectures may be.
You mentioned David Marr's book. Given its age, I assume some parts have stood the test of time better than others - would you recommend reading it all or would you focus just on the first part you mentioned in the lecture? And are there other books you would recommend? (I haven't got very far though the lectures yet so apologies if you mention some later on.)
Students are so needlessly cruel on course evals!
Aberrant behaviour should be expected.
So, can I go ahead and abstract out the ability of mind being discussed? Basically, given a category, this vision processing module in brain is processing different features of the image(here feature in the machine learning sense). And these categories can be hierarchical. Like faces, humans, creatures, this can be a hierarchy that the brain may be referring to when it is trying to identify a face and switches to the mode where it needs a holistic image view rather than some isolated parts of brain. I understand that imagining how this happens biologically(physiologically) is hard for me.
My question is, am I correct in the above inference? I want to suggest an experiment now :D :P
But you're saying that there may be more similarity than we thought. I remember way back when there was some evidence of things like horizontal- and vertical-feature detection. It sounds as if there is still some evidence of this but perhaps more plastic than was once imagined.
Are there any good theories on what happens during the training process of the brain (for example, while learning a new skill or something very basic/simple) and how individual neurons get affected by this "learning" process? So, I understand from a psychological perspective, we see the brain as this beautiful system but I am asking from physiological perspective. What kind of changes can we observe in neurons when we learn something new?
P.S: Thanks a lot for your replies. Means a lot. :)
I personally prefer long lectures, but if social media growth is what you are after, I'd keep it as it is.
I remember being shocked how little we actually know about the brain and wonder if we can unlock most of its secrets in our lifetimes. Thanks for being a part of the HN community :)
Any chance you've got material covering motor systems instead of the visual sensory systems?
I have an MA in philosophy and your friendly dig at philosophers' penchant for stuff like "undetached rabbit parts" made me lol.
youtube-dl --get-id https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGKBDfnk-iAQx4Kw9JeVqspbg77sfAK0 -i > ids.txt
while read id; do
youtube-dl -f bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$id
done < ids.txtLooks like it's gonna be a nerdy Saturday night binge watching these. Too bad there isn't a Netflix for this kind of stuff
Thank you again.
Teuber joked at the time that his intro course didn't count toward the humanities distribution requirement because it wasn't irrational enough.
Both excellent lecturers.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-0...