BCS 245: Sensory and Motor Neuroscience

Formerly: BCS/CVS/NSC/PSY 255
Cross-listed: CVS/NSC 245
Prerequisites: NSC 201 (BCS 240) Basic Neurobiology, or equivalent background with instructor's permission.
Offered: Spring

About this course:

This course provides an overview of the neural basis of perception and action, and thus bridges experimental psychology and neuroscience. It will cover many different sensory and motor systems, including vision, audition, somatosensation, chemical senses, eye movements, and reaching. How does the brain interpret and transform incoming sensory signals into the motor commands that move our bodies around in the environment? This process begins in sensory receptors, so the course begins by reviewing the events of sensory transduction that convert physical energy into a series of nerve impulses. The next major task for the brain is to extract various types of information from these sensory signals that are relevant to the animals' survival (e.g., detecting prey and predators, or distinguishing friends from enemies). Thus, a large portion of the course is devoted to reviewing how such analyses take place in different cortical processing streams, especially in vision. After explaining how muscles can convert nerve impulses into mechanical forces and how different movements are encoded in the brain, the course ends by examining the neural interface where animals' internal state (e.g., memory or attention) influences the course of action.