Placebo-Effect

The great MIT Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive offers a lot of free mate­ri­als on Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences. You can browse lec­ture notes, read­ings, and more on a vari­ety of psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science courses.

• “The human brain is the most com­plex, sophis­ti­cat­ed, and pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing device known. To study its com­plex­i­ties, the Depart­ment of Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy com­bines the exper­i­men­tal tech­nolo­gies of neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, neu­ro­science, and psy­chol­o­gy, with the the­o­ret­i­cal pow­er that comes from the fields of com­pu­ta­tion­al neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive science.”
• “The Depart­ment was found­ed by Hans-Lukas Teu­ber in 1964 as a Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, with the then-rad­i­cal vision that the study of brain and mind are insep­a­ra­ble. Today, at a time of increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion, our goal remains to under­stand cog­ni­tion- its process­es, and its mech­a­nisms at the lev­el of mol­e­cules, neu­rons, net­works of neu­rons, and cog­ni­tive mod­ules. We are unique among neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive sci­ence depart­ments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambi­tion. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis includ­ing mol­e­c­u­lar, cel­lu­lar, sys­tems, com­pu­ta­tion­al and cog­ni­tive approaches.”

There is a fas­ci­nat­ing new course titled A Clin­i­cal Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, includ­ing Top­ics and Lec­ture Sum­maries such as

• “Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: Teach­ing Old Dogs New Tricks. A sur­pris­ing dis­cov­ery in the last few years in neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy has been that neu­rons are born, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, in the adult mam­malian brain. Ini­tial­ly, this had been shown in ani­mals and, more recent­ly, in the humans hip­pocam­pus, the site of declar­a­tive mem­o­ry for­ma­tion. (See Gree­nough). Fur­ther­more, the rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis in ani­mals has been enhanced by expe­ri­ence, both phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and liv­ing in enriched envi­ron­ments (See [Read more…] about Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science @ MIT OpenCourseWare