Upper School Intersession 2025

Neuroscience is a relatively young field in biomedical research, but it has revolutionized our understanding of how humans and other organisms perceive and interact with the world. Additionally, neuroscience research has elucidated some of the mysteries of brain disease that have long since eluded the medical field. In this intersession course, students will take a survey of the world of neuroscience, with a focus on how the brain perceives and interacts with its environment.

The session will be divided into two parts: 1) a lecture-based survey of neuroscience that tracks the anatomy and physiology of how the brain processes visual stimuli and then plans and executes movements. The session will use the simple example of hitting a baseball to highlight the complex visual and motor computations that that the brain performs in less than a few tenths of a second. 2) The second half of the lesson will be a practical experiment where students will measure their own visual-motor reaction times and to use that data to estimate the speed at which information is processed in their brains and whether we can experimentally modulate information processing.