Brain Myths Exploded

Lessons from Neuroscience

De: The Great Courses, Indre Viskontas

Narrado por: Indre Viskontas

Much of the layperson's knowledge of the brain is predicated on a lack of understanding about this mysterious organ. To start building a more straightforward, accurate understanding of current breakthroughs in neuroscience, you have to start by shattering popular brain myths.

Each of these 24 lectures takes as its focus a single powerful, prevalent brain myth, and uses it as a launch pad from which to explore myriad topics in neuroscience: decision making, memory, dreams, emotions, neuroplasticity, consciousness, mental illness, and much more.

Our memory is an accurate, objective record of the past. Our senses reflect the world as it really exists. Our dreams have hidden meanings. We are only using 10% of our total brain power. Modern technology (including social media) is making us less intelligent. Dr. Viskontas doesn't just settle for obliterating these and other myths. Instead, she replaces them with scientific facts gathered from experiments, research, and case studies. The result is an eye-opening adventure into the latest understanding of why the brain works the way it does.

Whatever order you enjoy these lectures in, you'll be left with insights that will help you better determine the hard scientific truths behind the breaking news (and myths) of tomorrow.

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

©2017 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2017 The Great Courses

wide range of topics

Overall informative and good for the beginner (me) with a lot of physiological detail. I found the performance to be slightly overdramatic at times and in fact might have preferred this as an actual series of lectures rather than read in a recording room, but this was very minor and others may disagree. Content-wise, I heard her literally dispel miracles, and at other times suggest other deeply personal experiences to be essentially fabrications of the human mind, which I found to be presumptive, possibly beyond the scope of this audiobook, and probably offensive to a lot of listeners. I found much is the content to be very interesting, but a few parts like miracles and everyone discriminates (next to last chapter) to not quite live up to the scientific rigor established elsewhere.

Great !

A very fascinating and insightful look into the human brain and how it reveals the complexity of our relationship to the world we see ourselves in. A must listen!

Fascinating

a bit long, but easy to listen to an understand. I like the narrator, she keeps you wired so to speak. the subject is very intriguing and well spaced out on categories. if you are interested in the subject of the brain and how it works its a great book to get. I recommend it, in the even someone is waiting to see if a random person on the internet would recommend this book :)

Thoughtful and thorough presentation

Interesting and engaging topics. Performance could have used some editing as there were many mistakes

Fascinating Course Marred by Mediocre Narration

This course is designed to allow those unfamiliar with brain science to follow along comfortably and delight to those who are already reasonably well informed about current science news.. The lectures on the functions of the Amygdala (much in the news lately and even featured in a chapter of Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind"), multi-tasking, distraction and brain plasticity were of strong personal interest.

One nit is that there is a huge amount of information presented in each chapter. This is a good thing and easy to deal with in a lecture hall where note taking tools are the norm. However, since most of us tend to listen to course material like this while driving or on a walk, having a recap of the key points at the end of each chapter would be much appreciated.

The main problem with this course is Dr. Viskontas' narration. Her accomplishments are legion, both as a musician and a neuroscientist. However, her narration skills and vocal dynamics are limited. Her sheer enthusiasm may well carry her in a lecture hall but not so much in an audiofile. Her voice tends to rise in pitch as she gets excited and gets near to a whine when she's striving to emphasize a particular point. There is also a tendency toward the Valley Girl cadence of ending sentences and thoughts on a rising inflection. Fortunately, the latter is not evident through all the lectures, but enough to get very, very, very, very old...

There were a number of mispronunciations. The most jarring was speaking the word linguistics (and neurolinuguistics) as liNG'u'istiks rather than the correct liNGˈɡwistiks. The error was made repeatedly through a section that dealt with neurolingustics in relation to brain studies.

Lastly, Dr. Viskontas misread her notes or stumbled over words in her narration far more often than Audible listeners are used to. It is probably a credit to the quality of most of Audible narrators that we have become used to nearly flawless readings. In this case, it just felt like Dr. Viskontas, as an amateur narrator (despite her brief TV voice over career), underestimated the amount of practice time required.

It's not the intention to be petty in this critique. The point is that the last couple of hours got increasingly more difficult to listen to due to the mediocre narration skills.

With that said, Dr. Viskontas has prepared a whiz-bang set of lectures to review the current state of brain science!