Understanding the Human Brain: A Users Guide
Heather Berlin is a cognitive neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Dr. Berlin is a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Committee on Science and Technology Engagement with the Public. She co-hosts StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and hosted the PBS series Science Goes to the Movies, and the Discovery Channel series Superhuman Showdown.
Overview
You are your brain, according to modern neuroscience, but how exactly do your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sense of self derive from this three-pound organ locked inside the black box of your skull? Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin has been seeking answers to those questions for decades, and finding surprising answers in the brains of people with psychiatric and neurological disorders. What happens in the brains of people who can’t control themselves, or whose sense of self is fragmented, or lost entirely? By tracing the distinct brain circuits that give rise to her patients’ disorders, Dr. Berlin is revealing the neurophysiology that makes each of us who we are.
Join us on a journey deep into the brain, the mind, and the self, as Professor Berlin reveals the startling and exciting recent findings of cutting-edge neuroscience. How does your brain accomplish spontaneous creativity? How much self-control or “free will” do we really have? And what does the future hold, once brains begin to integrate with “neural prosthetics”? Get to know your dynamic unconscious mind, a bigger part of “who you are” than you could ever guess, with Dr. Berlin as your guide.