Understanding the Brain

By: Jeanette Norden, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Jeanette Norden

Considering everything the brain does, how can it possibly be the source of our personalities, dreams, thoughts, sensations, utterances, and movements?

Understanding the Brain, a 36-lecture course by award-winning Professor Jeanette Norden of Vanderbilt University, takes you inside this astonishingly complex organ and shows you how it works. With its combination of neurology, biology, and psychology, this course helps you understand how we perceive the world through our senses, how we move, how we learn and remember, and how emotions affect our thoughts and actions. Your tour starts with the organization of the central nervous system at the gross, cellular, and molecular levels, then investigates in detail how the brain accomplishes a host of tasks - from seeing and sleeping to performing music and constructing a personal identity.

You explore a broad range of exciting topics in neuroscience and come away with a deeper knowledge of how the brain is organized - and a feeling of wonder and appreciation for all that it accomplishes.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2007 The Great Courses (P)2007 The Teaching Company, LLC

Solid primer

Solid primer, well delivered lectures. It's a survey so doesn't get too in depth to any particulars.

There is a reason

I thought this teaching was pretty good, I do like to know why certain organs that I have what there primary functions are and the brain is always a mystery to me and I did like the lectures

More Pictures and Diagrams

Hard to follow many portions of the lecture without more illustrations and diagrams included in the PDF.

Good Content and Presenter, Lazy implement by Audible

Overall this a good course, but for the first half of it constantly refers to figures and models that could only be seen if one was watching the lecture as a video. Additionally much of these models are not shown in the accompanying pdf which I believe is an easy place to make up for the the missing content in the audio lectures. If you are able to do a little bit of side work to look up these models and parts of the brain separately it’s worth the time, but it’s obvious most listen to audible due to time constraints or just to listen, so that’s where the clear mismatch is.

It’s worth noting this performance limitation is most likely the company’s cause, not the professor, since they clearly took the video lectures and simply turned it into an audio book after the fact without considering that listeners would not be able to see all thee references.

More in depth into neuroscience than expected

More in depth into neuroscience than expected.
Also many references to visual aids I do not have access to.

obviously not made for audible

I took a neuroscience course as part of my PhD program, but it has been 24 years since then, and I am a physician now. It was a good refresher without all the molecular biology, and no pressure to memorize anything for tests. I wish this would have been made for Audible, though, without all of the references to diagrams, pictures, thr positions of her hands, etc.

Requires Visuals

This is one of the Great Courses which really does require the visuals to go with the audio. While I am certain the digital booklet of visuals is accessible via Audible, that's just not how I consume this content.

ok but quite outdated

there are quite a few things that have benen proven not to be the case in the last 15 years and a lot of things missing from todays standard. Still a quite good introduction to neuroscience(although the references to visuals Will be annoying if you're unfamiliar with the names of the brain areas) or a decent refresher course.

Subtle politics/ideology slipped in

There is a lot of information about the different areas of the brain and their function, but there is also a subtle political slant to this course. Most gullible freshman wouldn’t pick up on it and would go on to repeat this political slant as dogma. In other words, it must be true because this professor said it. For example, she claims that shortly after conception males who have a loss of testosterone at a critical point develop a female brain that can never be changed. She has no evidence of this. There is no way to measure the testosterone level of a zygote without destroying it, and then you would have no way of knowing what their brain developed into. Even if you could, you would have to wait for decades and hope the person donated their brain to science to find out what it developed into. It hasn’t been done in any statistically valid way to prove her claim. The claim that female brains can be changed permanently to male brains by exposure to certain chemicals in utero is even more problematic. If it’s true… then there should be a public effort to eradicate these chemicals to ensure normal development. Try telling that to certain groups in today’s society. Try telling them that their development wasn’t “normal.” Try telling them that they are the way they are because of exposure to a foreign chemical and that we are going to get rid of that chemical to ensure normal development and as a consequence deplete their population.
Like I said; most gullible freshman wouldn’t pick up on the political leanings. They hear a learned professor giving 99% accurate scientific information, and they never pick up on the 1% that is the professor’s ideology.

This is essentially a scam

This material is not made to be listened to in audiobook format.

It requires the video to be understood, 90% of the first 2 chapters is her pointing at stuff on a (presumably) whiteboard or video-projection we can't see. And instructions such as "This thing here" don't help when all you have is the audio and a PDF with images.

Now, going past that, the books itself presents information in a seemingly very bad way, I haven't gone through all of it (due to the previously mentioned error) but it seems to fall into the age-old mistake of describing rather than exemplifying and explaining.

It concerns itself with describing what the various areas of the brain are called and the history behind the names... but I wanted to understand the FUNCTION of the brain from this books, that's what the title implies, and it doesn't seem to do that, at all.

It's boring, it managed to spend 1 hour emparting literally no information that my brain cared to remember, which is a rather impressive feat, assuming that's what you were aiming for.