Instructors: Samy Abdel-Ghaffar, Michael Eickenberg
Time: M 4-6
Room: 105 Cory
The human brain is a complex information processing system and is currently the topic of multiple fascinating branches of research. Understanding how it works is a very challenging scientific task. In recent decades, multiple techniques for imaging the activity of the brain at work have been invented, which has allowed the field of cognitive neuroscience to flourish. Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with studying the neural mechanisms underlying various aspects of cognition, by relating the activity in the brain to the tasks being performed by it. This typically requires exciting collaborations with other disciplines (e.g. psychology, biology, physics, computer science).
You should take this course if you’re interested in how the brain works and how you can use cutting edge brain imaging and data analysis tools to study it. During this course, you will learn tools based on the Python programming language to understand, manipulate, and explore human brain recordings (such as ECoG, EEG, MEG and fMRI). You will learn to formulate hypotheses about how the brain represents information and then test these hypotheses using real world data. You will learn useful analysis methods to help you derive conclusions from brain recording data.
By giving you first-hand experience in data analysis of brain data, this course will provide you an insight into the experiments and data used in the cognitive neuroscience field. It will allow you to build a better understanding of the current cutting edge research in cognitive neuroscience. Hence, you will be able to keep up with recent advances in this field and/or will be able to apply your knowledge by doing research here at Berkeley. Additionally, the data analysis techniques and the investigation approaches that you will learn will be easily transferable to research in other disciplines.