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MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

nancysbraintalks.mit.edu

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Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#41

Post by nancykanwisher »

akjetma wrote: post #40
nancykanwisher wrote: post #21

Hi all- I am so psyched to see that some are finding the videos interesting! Do send comments if you have them. cheers, Nancy

Just wanted to say thanks--I'm really enjoying these videos!

So glad to hear it, thank you. Do let me know if you encounter bits that are not clear or if you see ways the lectures could be improved. BTW the lectures were all originally 1 hour and 25 minutes - I just broke them into pieces because everyone tells me that is what web viewers like. Is that working for you guys, or would you prefer to watch a whole 1.5 hour lecture not broken into bits?

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#42

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #41
akjetma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say thanks--I'm really enjoying these videos!

So glad to hear it, thank you. Do let me know if you encounter bits that are not clear or if you see ways the lectures could be improved. BTW the lectures were all originally 1 hour and 25 minutes - I just broke them into pieces because everyone tells me that is what web viewers like. Is that working for you guys, or would you prefer to watch a whole 1.5 hour lecture not broken into bits?

I don't think pieces are necessarily what web viewers like, but it increases the potential virality of the video by breaking a broad lecture into tweetable, sharable soundbites, thus videos of this format become the de facto web video format.

I personally prefer long lectures, but if social media growth is what you are after, I'd keep it as it is.

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#43

Post by sriram_malhar »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #33
4mitkumar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am about 4 hours in and still into it! Thank you for sharing the lectures. Just finished the series on Face Recognition. I was wondering if the fusiform face area (FFA) get activated while thinking of someone's face instead of actually looking at one? Might also be interesting to explore the memory of faces in persons with prosopagnosia? Haven't actuallly googled for these yet. Will do so in a bit.. after the next…

Thank you! It means so much to me that some people are appreciating these lectures. I knocked myself out all spring preparing this course, and it was quite a gut punch to read my course evaluations a few days ago, which ere pretty negative. I was so dispirited, I was actually thinking of stopping posting the lectures, but if you guys/gals are into it, that is awesome,I will keep at it! To answer your question: yes we…

What? Negative reviews? Why would anyone do that? Get fMRIs of their brains. That lump of entitlement is pressing down on important parts of the brain.

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#44

Post by ghaff »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #5
ghaff wrote: post #3

There's a long history of really great MIT intro (or relatively so) psychology/brain science courses. Back in the 1970s, the intro course was a hugely popular lecture taught by the head of the department.

Yes, Hans-Lukas Teuber. https://wikipedia.org/en/Hans-Lukas_Teuber What impressed me so much about the course was it was completely focused on what, scientifically (via measurement), was known about the brain. I loved that it wasn't a 'fluff' psychology class at all.

MIT was rather unusual at the time for taking such a physiology and brain science approach to psychology. The prevalent school of thought, notably at Harvard with Skinner, was to treat the brain more or less as a black box and focus on the inputs and outputs.

Teuber joked at the time that his intro course didn't count toward the humanities distribution requirement because it wasn't irrational enough.

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#45

Post by martinpw »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #33
4mitkumar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am about 4 hours in and still into it! Thank you for sharing the lectures. Just finished the series on Face Recognition. I was wondering if the fusiform face area (FFA) get activated while thinking of someone's face instead of actually looking at one? Might also be interesting to explore the memory of faces in persons with prosopagnosia? Haven't actuallly googled for these yet. Will do so in a bit.. after the next…

Thank you! It means so much to me that some people are appreciating these lectures. I knocked myself out all spring preparing this course, and it was quite a gut punch to read my course evaluations a few days ago, which ere pretty negative. I was so dispirited, I was actually thinking of stopping posting the lectures, but if you guys/gals are into it, that is awesome,I will keep at it! To answer your question: yes we…

These lectures are fantastic, please don't stop!

You mentioned David Marr's book. Given its age, I assume some parts have stood the test of time better than others - would you recommend reading it all or would you focus just on the first part you mentioned in the lecture? And are there other books you would recommend? (I haven't got very far though the lectures yet so apologies if you mention some later on.)

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#46

Post by sizzle »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #21

Hi all- I am so psyched to see that some are finding the videos interesting! Do send comments if you have them. cheers, Nancy

Awesome lectures! Did cogsci undergrad many years ago. If you had to estimate how much of the brain the field of neuroscience truly understands, what would that percentage be around?

I remember being shocked how little we actually know about the brain and wonder if we can unlock most of its secrets in our lifetimes. Thanks for being a part of the HN community :)

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#47

Post by ghaff »

I'm interested to check this out. I've been trying to understand AI better--but mostly from the ML perspective. I'm very out of date on brain science though. I took 9.00 back in the dark ages :-) but I'm not at all up on current research.

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#48

Post by ghaff »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #37
manoj_venkat92 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey,I'm at lecture 2.6,you're talking about the recognition of faces and it's relationship with the holistic image view/image processing. So, can I go ahead and abstract out the ability of mind being discussed? Basically, given a category, this vision processing module in brain is processing different features of the image(here feature in the machine learning sense). And these categories can be hierarchical. Like fac…

Sounds like you got it, more or less. Current views of how object recognition works in the brain are a lot like current deep net models of object recognition (e.g. Alexnet and beyond): a heirarchical series of processing steps in which units at successive processing stages get more selective for specific things, and more invariant to image variation (size, position, lighting, etc). One view of holistic face perceptio…

Interesting. In the past, I've read researchers commenting that "neural networks" was mostly unfortunate terminology because it implied the similarities between the physical patterns of the brain and connections between nodes in a neural network were a surface similarity that probably didn't offer insights into how the brain really worked.

But you're saying that there may be more similarity than we thought. I remember way back when there was some evidence of things like horizontal- and vertical-feature detection. It sounds as if there is still some evidence of this but perhaps more plastic than was once imagined.

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#49

Post by nancykanwisher »

sizzle wrote: post #46
nancykanwisher wrote: post #21

Hi all- I am so psyched to see that some are finding the videos interesting! Do send comments if you have them. cheers, Nancy

Awesome lectures! Did cogsci undergrad many years ago. If you had to estimate how much of the brain the field of neuroscience truly understands, what would that percentage be around? I remember being shocked how little we actually know about the brain and wonder if we can unlock most of its secrets in our lifetimes. Thanks for being a part of the HN community :)

It depends what you mean by "understand" :-) On many interpretations, we understand none of it!

Re: MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

#50

Post by THE_PUN_STOPS »

nancykanwisher wrote: post #33
4mitkumar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am about 4 hours in and still into it! Thank you for sharing the lectures. Just finished the series on Face Recognition. I was wondering if the fusiform face area (FFA) get activated while thinking of someone's face instead of actually looking at one? Might also be interesting to explore the memory of faces in persons with prosopagnosia? Haven't actuallly googled for these yet. Will do so in a bit.. after the next…

Thank you! It means so much to me that some people are appreciating these lectures. I knocked myself out all spring preparing this course, and it was quite a gut punch to read my course evaluations a few days ago, which ere pretty negative. I was so dispirited, I was actually thinking of stopping posting the lectures, but if you guys/gals are into it, that is awesome,I will keep at it! To answer your question: yes we…

Hi, as a recent undergraduate at an engineering school in the Boston area, I can truthfully say these are some of the best lectures that I’ve been exposed to on a technical topic. Thanks for publishing them to the public.

Students are so needlessly cruel on course evals!

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