Life Sciences - Brain, Behaviour and Cognition
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To study the ways in which biological processes taking place in the
brain give rise to complex, high-level mental phenomena such as
thinking, feeling, action and consciousness. This stream will consider
neural function across many "levels of description" ranging from
low-level processes such as gene activation, synaptic transmission and
neural plasticity, all the way up to high-level processes such as
attention, perception, memory and motor control. The stream will also
examine some of the ways in which such processes can go awry, leading
to disorders of mental functioning.
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Students who have completed this stream will be able to describe:
- The anatomical organisation of the central and peripheral nervous system, and how this arises during development
- The biology of a typical neuron including its structure, the
generation of nerve impulses, the ways in which neurons send signal
both within and between themselves, and the ways in which neural
connections can change
- The fundamental processes underlying behaviour including
perception, representation, learning and memory, attention, action,
decision-making and emotions/mood
- Some of the ways in which the properties of neurons and their circuits are thought to mediate the above processes
- The basics of computational neuroscience including how neural
networks are structured and how they may process information, form
representations and be modified on the basis of past activity
- The ways in which neural processes sometimes go awry, as a result
of mal-development, accident or disease, leading to disorders of
functioning such as Alzheimer's disease, addiction, psychosis, autism
and many others
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Page last modified on 22 sep 10 11:42
