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Understanding the Brain

By: Jeanette Norden, The Great Courses
Narrated by: Jeanette Norden
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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
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What listeners say about Understanding the Brain

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Keep listening - it’s worth it

For the first 2-3 hours I was considering leaving this book and leaving a negative review. This was not due to the content but the fact it covers some very complex notions on how the brain is organised and operates with multiple references to images - I found myself googling at times just to conceptualise what the hell the speaker was talking about. After this though I really started appreciating the breadth and depth applied to covering this challenging topic and was fascinated again and again. My views on the brain have changed radically now and I now look at others and myself in a different light. I will listen to this book again I think.

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Packed with facts

Great overview of the tip of the iceberg. It enhanced greatly my very basic understanding of the subject. I believe it would be very helpful to watch the video version as the presenter is often using phrases such: "This is here...", "Look there..." etc.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A great sounding course but not for an audiobook.

The content and delivery are good but she referred too often to images and a physical model of the brain. This made it quite difficult to follow without sitting next to my computer and looking up the structures she was talking about.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

great course... but only half value without images

I would have loved to watch this course but in audio it was frustrating. She is a great presenter, but she keeps pointing to the brain model, brain tissue samples, diagrams and MRI images. The other courses in the series were more adapted to listening only. I strongly recommend you buy this course, but on video, not on audio.

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5 people found this helpful

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Poorly executed - a real shame

Whilst it was very interesting and informative, it was also difficult to follow sometimes because this isn't actually an audiobook, but rather a presence lecture with plenty of visual material and prompts that we have no access to. The PDF doesn't always have the picture, graph or whatever she is using to show her audience examples of what she is talking about. We know that we are missing the visual aids as she says things like: "if you look here" or "the darker colour" or "just bellow here", etc. That was very disappointing and frustrating. A bit of mumbling too. So poorly executed that it's infuriating as it was a lazy way to do it.

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    2 out of 5 stars

Tedious

The content is detailed and comprehensive and I certainly learned a great deal. However, the presenter, although very knowledgeable, does not do it justice. To this UK English speaker her accent was distracting and her use of grammar was not appropriate. For example she continuously used the phrase "...is going to be..." when simply " ...is... " should be used. It really does become annoying. But worse, she is clearly referring to visual aids which are not available to the listener. As such, this course is not suitable for sale in Audible unless all aids are available in the pdf and signposted in the presentation.

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11 people found this helpful