Understanding the Brain

By: Jeanette Norden, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Jeanette Norden

Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

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ok but quite outdated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.

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

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 Pictures and Diagrams

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

great courses fan here; but this one doesn’t work as audio only

I tried overlooking several references to “look at this place on the brain where I’m touching my finger” or “look at this part of the brain” references to things you can’t see in an audiobook. I checked the PDF and there’s only a couple diagrams and she just didn’t do good enough at describing what she’s referring to in a way I can follow along while listening only.

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 a video without image

The only frustrating thing is that the professor is OFTEN referring to something to look at, which does not even appear in the accompanying pdf. Feels cheap to cut the audio from a video and call it an audiobook. :/

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.