What Disease Teaches about Cognition
MBB 980H
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
This course seeks to reconcile the complicated and messy problems of patients with brain disease with the concise analysis of precisely defined cognitive functions in normal subjects. Students will learn to overlap cognitive functions on to the brain in disease - at the gross dissection and imaging levels - and to understand some of the complex interactions of individual cognitive operations in disease using the examples of famous landmark cases in the literature (e.g.Broca’s Monsieur Leborgne, Phineas Gage, HM and others). The course will include a dissection of a human brain, an examination of how the actual brain maps onto two dimensional neuroimages, and discussions of how the classic lesion based maps of cortical function are related to contemporary maps based on functional neuroimaging.
Class Notes
Enrollment via lottery; consult https://mbb.harvard.edu/seminars for lottery deadline, instructions, and link. Preference to juniors in MBB tracks and MBB secondary field. Course content inquiries to william_milberg@hms.harvard.edu.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
