The brain

1. Astonishing hypothesis
So here's where things begin for real.
I want to welcome people to the course and I want to welcome people
to the first
series of lectures, which is on the brain, on neuroscience.
And I want to begin this series of lectures and
the course itself, with a story about a man named Phineas Gage, and
an event that happened to Gage in the summer of 1848 in Cavendish,
Vermont.
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So Gage was a blasting foreman working on a railway construction
project and
his job, at that time, was to clear away rock so that they could lay
down tracks.
And to do so, his routine during those days,
was that he would bore a hole in the rocks.
Inside the hole, he put blasting powder and a fuse in.
Then he would cover that up with dirt and sand and
take a tamping iron, which he carried with him.
A big piece of steel, looked like a javelin and
use it to tamp down the sand and
dirt, so that later they could set the fuse and cause the explosions.
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Well one day, something didn't work.
Nobody's exactly sure why, maybe he just forgot to put in the sand
and the dirt.
But regardless, he put the tamping iron into the hole, the powder
exploded.
[SOUND] The tamping iron shot away from his hand and went into his
face.
It entered the left side of Gage's jaw, moving in an upward direction,
it passed behind the left eye through the left side of the brain and
it went out the top of his skull and landed several feet away of the
clutter.
Now miraculously Gage wasn't killed on the spot.
He lost consciousness for a little bit, but then he staggered to his feet.
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And in some regards, Gage was very lucky.
So he underwent a series of operations, he had infections, he got
sick.
At times, his life was at risk.
But months later, he was, in certain regards, pretty much recovered.
He was able to see,
he wasn't deaf, he wasn't paralyzed, he didn't lose the ability to speak
or
understand language, he didn't lose his intellectual capacities in any
simple way.
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But in another sense Gage was very unlucky
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because Gage has been transformed by this incident.
Someone who knew Gage describes the transformation like this.
Before the accident Gage was, quote the most efficient and capable
man, a man of
temperate habits, considerable energy of character, a sharp shrewd
businessman.
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After the accident, Gage was no longer Gage.
He was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity
manifesting but little deference for his fellows.
He ended up losing his job.
He traveled through the states taking up different jobs,
engaging in different relationships.
And ultimately ended up in an exhibit in a travelling circus,
holding a tamping iron and telling people about this terrible story
about how it
went through his head and went through his brain, and changed his
life.
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So, why am I telling you this story?
Well, as I said, I want to begin the course by talking about the brain.
And the story of Phineas Gage illustrates something which we have
abundant reason to
believe, which is that the brain is the source of mental life.
And so damage to the brain can have profound effects on
who we are and what we are.
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An idea here is nicely summarized by the Nobel prize winning
 biologist Francis Crick, he calls it the Astonishing Hypothesis.
As he writes, the Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and
your sorrows,
your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity
and free will,
are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve
cells and
their associated molecules.
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Now this assembly of nerve cells is of course the brain, the brain and
parts of the spinal cord, but we're going to talk about the brain here.
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An the idea then, as sometimes people like to put it the mind is the
brain or
that the mind is what the brain does or the mental life emerges from
the brain.
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The official term for this is materialism that we are material beings.
Everybody accepts that our arms and legs and our heart and
kidneys are made of the same sort of stuff as rabbits and automobiles
and cups.
But the idea is that our mental life, what makes us special,
our most intimate feelings and thoughts also arise from these material
things.
And this the idea that makes possible the discipline of neuroscience
and
much of psychology.

2. dualism
We're talking about materialism, 
the idea that our mental life emerges from our physical brain. 
If you're listening closely, 
if you're thinking about this, 
I hope you acknowledged that this is an odd and unnatural
view. 
I don't expect you to believe it, 
at least not at first. 
And in fact, for the most part, 
people are far more attracted to the doctrine called "Dualism." 
Dualism is an idea that's been found in just about every religion
and every philosophy. 
It's made explicit in Plato, for instance. 
But I think the most thoughtful and articulate defender 
of dualism was the philosopher, Rene Descartes. 
Descartes believed that animals were material things. 
He thought that the doctrine of materialism was correct about
non-human animals. 
"But humans are different," Descartes argued. 
For humans, there's a duality. 
We possess two sorts of things. 
We are composed of two sorts of things. 
We are in part material, 
but we're also in part spiritual, separate, mental, psychological. 
In some way that doesn't reduce to the material. 
He made two arguments for this, 
and they're both reasonably good arguments, 
at least quite persuasive at his time, 
and have persuaded many people and continue to persuade
many people. 
The first arguments for 
a non-material nature is that humans are capable of doing
things that no machine, 
no material entity ever could. 
So, it might surprise you to hear this, 
but Descartes in the 17th century was familiar with robots. 
He knew about the French Royal Gardens, 
which is like a 17th century Disneyland or Euro Disney, 
which had robots that react when you approach them or when
you step on certain stones. 
For instance, you might approach Diana, 
and then Neptune would jump out from the bushes holding a
trident. 
This was done not of electricity, but with water. 
So, Descartes knew about these robots, 
and Descartes asked, "Well, 
maybe we're such things, 
maybe we're just machines responding to the environment." 
And he said that we can't be. 
He said maybe animals, 
non-human animals can be, 
but human behavior is far more complicated, 
and variegated, and subtle to be explained in such simple
ways. 
We'll return to this point later on in the course when we talk
about 
Noam Chomsky and Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism, 
which argued that basically humans respond 
in a relatively reflexive way to environmental stimuli. 
Descartes along with Chomsky said, "That can't be. 
Our behavior's far too complicated for that. 
So, we can't be machines." 
His second argument is probably better now, 
and it's based on intuition. 
And his claim was we don't feel like bodies. 
So, to put it more technically, 
he applied what was called a method of doubt. 
He asked the question, 
"What do we know for sure, 
and what can we question?" 
So, for instance, you might believe you were born in such and
so place. 
You could be wrong. 
You could be deceived. 
You might believe that the Earth is thousands or millions of
years old. 
But maybe the Earth was created 100 years ago and 
all the memories that your grandparents have of the past were
just manufactured. 
You might believe, said Descartes, 
that you live in a world of things, 
that you're sitting on a chair or there's a wall in 
front of you or there's a computer near your hands. 
But Descartes observe that we often believe 
such things when we're in dreams, but weren't mistaken. 
He observed that people who are mentally ill, 
or were deranged in some way, 
might have such beliefs, 
but don't be mistaken. 
So, you could be wrong that there's a physical world around
you. 
You could be wrong that there is a body that you have. 
This is an ancient concern of course, 
but it's best articulated in the movie, The Matrix, 
which maintains that we think we're running around in the
physical world, but actually, 
with the lucky exception of our heroes like Neo and Trinity, 
we're actually just plugged into some sort of system. 
Another version of this is that we're brains in a vat. 
If you were a brain, 
just the brain sitting in a vat with electrical wires 
stimulating your experiences, you couldn't help. 
Maybe you are such things. 
Modern-day philosophers for instance, 
will argue that there's an excellent chance that 
we are simulations, we computer simulations. 
So, Descartes and people following Descartes said, 
"There's a lot we can't be sure of. 
The things that we are seemingly most confident about in real
world can't be shaken." 
But Descartes said, "There's one thing you can't doubt. 
You can't doubt your own consciousness. 
You can't doubt your own existence." 
The famous line is, 
"I think, therefore I am." 
And spelling out this intuition, 
building from the fact you could doubt that you have a body, 
but you can't doubt that you have a mind. 
Descartes wrote, "I knew that I was 
a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, 
and that for its existence there is no need of any place, 
nor does it dependent in a material thing.. that is to say, 
the soul by which I am what I am, 
is entirely distinct from body." 
So, that's a philosophical case for dualism. 
But as I said, 
dualism is also emerged out of common sense. 
Think about how you describe your body. 
You describe your body's if you possess it. 
My arm, my heart, my body, 
my brain, as if it's something separate from you that you have. 
Or consider your intuitions about personal identity. 
So, typically, as people age, 
their consciousness follows their body. 
So, I get 10 years older, 
my mind 10 years older, 
my brain is 10 years older, 
it all connects together, 
but we easily accept at least infection that people can hop from
one body to another. 
There are many comedies that involve body switching, body
swamps. 
There are movies that involve somebody going to 
sleep one morning as one person and waking up as another. 
We understand they're fiction, they aren't real. 
But they make sense to us. 
There's an intuitive rationale to this. 
We don't walk out of the theory and say, 
"I am totally confused what happened there." 
Rather, at least with our naive conception of the self, 
we accept that least of the possibility, 
that you can hop from one body to another. 
None of this is limited to modern-day movies, 
the most famous short story of history by Franz Kafka begins
with the sentence, 
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, 
he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." 
Metamorphosis involves that transformation and along before 
that in Ulysses the characters are transformed. 
Some of the characters are transformed by an evil witch into
pigs. 
It's non of you took to people and turn them into pigs rather it's
much worse. 
They put them in the body of pigs. 
As the passage goes, 
"They had the head and voice, and bristles, 
and body of swine; 
but their minds remained unchanged as before. 
So they were penned there, weeping." 
Our conception that bodies and cells are separate, 
allows us to accept idea you had many people inhabiting one
body. 
This is how many people think about multiple personality
disorder, 
something we'll get to quite later on the course. 
It's also at the root of a view that many people; 
both religious and non-religious hold, 
which is the idea of demonic possession. 
Your body can be taken over by somebody else. 
Another manifestation of dualism, 
is you could believe in intelligent beings without bodies. 
If mind and body are separate it raises 
the possibility you could have one without the other. 
Plainly you got to have bodies without minds. 
That's what a corpse is. 
But the argument goes you could also have minds without
bodies. 
This is for instance what many people think about gods or
angels. 
Which are the immaterial beings that can think, that can
observe, 
that can act, but they don't have physical bodies in the same
sense that we do. 
Finally, and maybe most important for people, 
the idea that of dualism, 
the idea you are not your physical body, 
raises what must be for many and incredibly appealing
consequence, 
which is that you can survive the destruction of the body. 
In fact, if you ask most people; 
religious and non-religious, what will happen after you body is
destroyed? 
The answer is not well, 
I'm dead then, that's it. 
It's the end of things. 
But rather the belief is that you can live on. 
Maybe you'll end up in some spirit world, 
maybe you will ascend to heaven, 
if you're unlucky maybe will descend to hell. 
Maybe you'll occupy some other body as an reincarnation. 
But the idea is that the destruction of 
your body need not be the destruction of you because you are
not your body. 
All of these beliefs, 
the beliefs about personal identity, 
the beliefs about life after death, 
about the existence of supernatural beings. 
About God. All rest at least to some extent, 
on a dualist perspective. 
So, materialism, which says dualism is just playing wrong is an
audacious view, 
and should be treated as such. 
You shouldn't just shrug and write it down. 
You should grapple with it, you should worry about it. 
You should either be grudgingly accepted or fight against it. 
So, why are modern-day psychologists and 
neuroscientists so confident that dualism is mistaken? 
Well, there are a few problems with it. 
One is that it simply doesn't help us explain certain things that
need to be explained. 
Appealing to an immaterial world to 
an immaterial soul seems to dock certain questions that really
do deserve an answer. 
So, throughout this course we'll ask questions like, 
how do we learn language? 
What do we find sexually attractive? 
How does memory work? 
These are questions about ourselves, about our minds. 
To say, "Oh, it all happens some immaterial realm", 
leaves us hopeless when it comes to answering them. 
The second concern is that at the time, Descartes was correct, 
to infer from the limitations of material things physical things, 
that we probably are not physical things. 
But by now we have a much better understanding what
physical things can do which makes it 
entirely possible for many of us that we are set things. 
So, I'm thinking for instance of computers and robots. 
For Descartes, the idea that a physical thing can do something 
as complicated as play a game of chess would seem ludicrous. 
But now of course we know that physical things and 
if you're looking at a computer you are looking at such a
physical thing, 
can do exactly that. 
They can understand language, 
they could recognize objects, 
they could store things in memory, 
they can make inferences, and so on. 
Now, for some of these things, 
they don't do it anywhere near as well as people do. 
So, when we talk about language development for instance we
see that, 
a two-year-old child uses and understands language better
than any computer around. 
So, we need to bear that in mind. 
But still, it's no longer nuts to say that physical thing can do 
all of the rich and psychologically 
diverse and psychologically complicated things that people do. 
Which means that we have to take seriously 
the claim that we are in fact such physical things. 
The final consideration is that there's 
tremendous evidence that the brain is in fact the roots of mental
life. 
So, put aside all that philosophical abstract, 
arguments, there's just tons of direct evidence. 
To some extent that direct evidence has always been there. 
You don't have to be born in the 20th or 21st century to 
appreciate that getting hit in the head could affect your
consciousness and your memory. 
To appreciate that diseases like syphilis 
can lead to disruption of the will and of consciousness. 
Alzheimer's can rob you of your rationality. 
That coffee and alcohol can inflame the passions. 
It just is so evident in everyday life that if 
physical events that affect the brain can affect ourselves, 
suggesting that at the very least, 
our mental life is intimately connected to the brain. 
Over recent years something else has happened, 
which is we've developed technologies that allow us to look
directly into the brain. 
Look at the brains activation, 
and infer from patterns of the brain activation what people are
thinking. 
So, very crudely, you can put somebody into a scanner, an
fMRI scanner, 
and you could tell whether or not are thinking about language, 
or music, or sex. 
The technology is increasing. 
There is such a point that is not implausible 
that for some of you by the time you're listening to this, 
we can put a sleeping person under fMRI scanner, 
and know from neural patterns of neural firings, 
know what they're dreaming. 
All of this I think it is very difficult to keep this in mind, 
and hold on to the view of dualism. 
I think materialism however uncomfortable, 
however unpalatable is a view that the science forces us to
adopt.

3.neurons
So, what is the physical seed of thought? 
What is the source of our emotions, 
or decision-making, our passions, 
or pains, and everything else? 
Well, it's the brain, 
and it's set to be the most complex mechanism in the known
universe. 
You might expect, given all it is, and given all it does, 
that will look very pretty, 
Philips shimmering lights and glass tubes, and mysterious
colors. 
But in fact, it looks really kind of gross, 
it looks a the three-day old meatloaf. 
It's gray when you take it out of the head, 
and inside the head it's bright red because of all the blood. 
In fact, it turns out very surprisingly that the source of our
mental life, 
of our consciousness is meat. 
In fact, you could eat it, 
people have eaten brains, 
I've had brain with cream sauce, not human brain, 
mind you, but I've had brain with cream sauce. 
It's not bad. 
But it makes the puzzle all the more harder, 
how can this fleshy thing give rise to mental life? 
That's the question I want to explore in this lecture, and the rest
of the lectures. 
I want to do so by starting with the smallest relevant parts, 
different parts of neurons. 
Then explore how the neurons are connected together, 
how they're wired up, 
how they form different subparts of the brain, 
like the hypothalamus and the frontal lobe. 
Finally, talking about the brain, 
and the larger perspective, 
looking at the two halves of the brain, 
the left half and right half, 
and how they interact. 
Now, there's a lot of stuff in the brain, 
a lot of chemical stuff, 
a lot of different parts, 
but where the action is, 
the part that does the thinking, 
the part that is the focus of most of our research, is the
neurons. 
It's not an accident they call the study of the biological basis of
thought neuroscience, 
because it all comes from the neurons. 
So, you can see here pictures of neurons interacting together. 
Here's a diagram that depicts a typical neuron. 
So, what you see is the dendrites, 
and dendrites receive signals from other neurons. 
Either excitatory, like pluses, or inhibitory, minuses. 
Then they get to the cell body, 
which sums up these pluses and minuses. 
When you reach a certain threshold, 
a certain amount of pluses, there's neural firing. 
Firing takes place through the axon, 
and the axon is much longer than the dendrites. 
In fact, for some motor neurons, 
it's very long indeed. 
There's axons running from your spinal cord, 
all the way to your big toe. 
You could think of it of the relative sizes of things in terms of a
basketball, 
and a 40-mile garden hose. 
Surrounding the axon is what's called a myelin sheath. 
The myelin sheath is- you can think of it as insulation, 
as fatty tissue like insulation on a wire. 
So, the information comes through the dendrites, 
and summed up in the cell body, 
and it's transmitted through the axon. 
So, what neurons do, 
is they sum up and transmit information, 
and we know that there's a lot of them. 
By some estimates, it's 100 billion, 
or the estimates tend to be very different and very rough, 
but there's billions upon billions of neurons, 
and each connect to thousands, 
maybe tens of thousands of other neurons. 
So, the fact that you have something of this degree of
complexity, 
this degree of structure, 
structure which there's no way to replicate in any machine, 
the numbers are just too big is 
why people might describe the brain as the most complicated
machine in the universe. 
At least this is fitting, it's made of meat maybe. 
Which is kind of disappointing, 
but at least it shows its incredible internal structure. 
So, neurons come in three flavors. 
There are sensory neurons, 
which take in information from the environment, 
from the external world. 
There's motor neurons, which go from the brain out to your
motor control. 
So, if you touch something hot, 
and you feel the pain, 
that is sensory neurons, 
if you rent your hand back, 
or you reach for something, that's motor neurons. 
Finally, there's interneurons, which 
connect different neurons without making contact with external
world. 
Either through sensation, or through motor action. 
Now, the main thing to think about for neurons and 
neuron firing is that it's all or nothing. 
It's like firing a gun, or sneezing. 
Neurons either fire, or they don't. 
Now, you might think that's a little bit strange, particularly, 
when you think about sensory neurons, 
because your experience seems to be a continuum. 
So, you have sensory neurons in your eyes, 
and you can distinguish from a very dim light, 
and a very bright light. 
You have sensory neurons in your fingers, 
and you could distinguish between gently touching something, 
versus being stabbed on the tip of your finger, or something. 
But still the neurons are all or nothing, 
the way we get to this continuity of 
experience is that neurons can code for intensity in different
ways. 
So, one way is in terms of the number of neurons that fire. 
If x neurons corresponds to a mild experience, 
x times 10 neurons may correspond to an intense experience. 
Another factor is the impulse frequency of individual neurons, 
an individual neuron might denote a mild sensation by doing
fire, fire, fire, fire. 
Well, it might denote an intense situation with fire, 
fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. 
So, you have neurons, 
and the neurons talk to each other, 
they talk to each other because axons, 
an axon of one neuron will communicate with the dendrites of
another neuron. 
A long time ago, people used to think that neurons were 
wired up together like a computer, 
but in fact, neurons don't actually touch one another. 
There is a gap between the axon terminal of one neuron, 
and the dendrite of another one. 
A very tiny gap, 
typically of like 1/110,000 of a meter wide. 
This gap is known as a synapse. 
When one neuron fires, 
the axon releases neurotransmitters, 
these are chemicals that shoot out over that gap, 
and affect dendrites and other neurons. 
As I said before, 
the effect of these neurotransmitters could be excitatory, 
which is that they raise the energy, 
so they increase the likelihood of a neuron firing, or inhibitory. 
So that they bring down the likelihood of a neuron firing. 
What's interesting is that different neurons shoot out different
neurotransmitters. 
So, they have different effects on other neurons that they made
contact with. 
In fact, a lot of psychopharmacology, 
both attempts to cure various psychological or physical
diseases by giving medicines, 
or recreational psychopharmacology designed to increase
pleasure of different forms, 
or sometimes help people work, 
or help people focus. 
Works by fiddling with the neurotransmitters and this can be
either antagonists, 
they lower down intensity of things by binding to the dendrites, 
making it hard to create more neurotransmitters, 
or they can increase the amount of 
neurotransmitters available in different ways agonists. 
So, you're either pumping up the volume or turning down the
volume. 
So, you think about different drugs and their effects. 
There's a curare. 
Curare, is a drug that used by South American Indians. 
It's a antagonist. 
It blocks motor neurons from affecting their muscle fibers. 
It keeps your motor neurons from working, 
and what it does is it paralyzes you, 
and in large enough doses, it kills you, 
because motor neurons also keep your heart beating. 
So, shut that down and you die. There's alcohol. 
Now, alcohol also has an inhibitory effect. 
You might think that's strange because when I drink 
alcohol I get all excited and happy and goofy. 
But you have to keep this in mind here, 
the way alcohol works is, 
it inhibits part of your brain that does the inhibition. 
So, you have part of your brain that says, 
don't say that to the other person, 
keep your pants on, stop yelling, 
and alcohol basically inhibits that part of the brain, 
making you more exuberant. 
Then, over the course of things, 
in the course of drinking too much, 
it also inhibits other parts of the brain. 
So, you could pass out and fall on the floor, 
and in large enough doses, die. 
So, both curare and alcohol, 
in different ways bring things down. 
Other drugs bring things up. 
So, amphetamines, for instance, 
increase the amount of norepinephrine, 
which is another neurotransmitter, 
that's responsible for genetic general arousal, 
and this is how drugs like speed or cocaine work. 
Other drugs like Prozac or L-Dopa, 
influence neurotransmitters in ways that they increase, 
for instance, the supply of dopamine or serotonin. 
Which can be relevant for issues like parkinsons, 
which seems to be related to too little dopamine, 
and depression, which is related to too little serotonin. 
So, these drugs work by influencing neurotransmitters, 
either by directly pumping in more neurotransmitters, 
or increasing the supply in different ways, 
or stopping them from having effects by 
binding them or sucking them up in different ways, 
but they work through their effects on neurotransmitters. 
So, the more general idea is, 
the way neurons lead to thinking, 
is that they form clusters or networks. 
These clusters and networks, 
are computational devices that do interesting things like
recognizing faces, 
or walking up right, 
or understanding sentences, or doing math, 
or experiencing great sadness, 
or falling in love, and so on. 
We now know that, that's possible, 
because we create computing machines that work in certain
ways. 
That if you wire up a computing machine in certain complicated
ways, 
it can do mathematics, play chess, 
do flight simulator, and so on. 
So, you may be interested in the project of 
computational neuroscience which tries to ask the question, 
how are neurons wired up to do interesting things, 
and uses our own success at computational theory as a model. 
Then, sometimes takes the inference the other way around, 
which is you can see how people do it, 
and then use this knowledge of how people do it, 
to create computational systems that can do it as well. 
So, how is the brain wired up? 
Well, you might imagine that it's wired up like a portable
computer, 
like a laptop, like the sort of computer you're looking at now. 
Into some regards it is, 
but there's a couple of reasons why it can't be, 
and both of them have to do with how well the brain works. 
So, first, the brain is highly resistant to damage. 
If you get a knife to the brain, 
if you get damage to the brain, 
it won't typically shut down the whole system. 
The information and capacitors somehow distributed across 
neurons in such a way that makes them extremely resilient to
damage. 
While in contrast, somebody could open up the back of your
laptop, 
pull out a chip and the whole thing is ruined, 
the whole thing will stop working. 
But the brain is wired up in a certain way that makes it highly
resilient. 
The second thing is, the brain is wired up in such a way that
makes it work very fast. 
So, computers can do millions of operations per second, 
because they're purely electrical, 
but brain tissue is much slower and can spend the time to do
many steps. 
So, to put it a different way, 
if your brain was wired up like a computer, 
it would be so slow, 
as to be entirely unusable. 
It has to be wired up in a way that's more efficient, 
that allows for the slowness of brain tissues and
neurotransmitters, 
and can still compute things at a level, 
at a human level, 
which is often blindingly fast. 
Because of this, there has been a huge interest in 
massively parallel systems and complicated neural networks, 
which are wired up as we believe the brain does, and as such, 
we are helping computers to do things based on 
our understanding of the brain that they could never do before. 
The details of this is something we're going to talk about
through the course. 
We're not actually going to end up explaining 
different capacities directly in terms of neurons, 
because we can't, and because we want it to have higher level
explanation. 
So, when I talk about how people learn language, 
or how do they recognize faces, 
we're not going to talk much about neurons in particular, 
but we will talk about different brain areas and how they work. 
Then the assumption is, the bet is, 
that everything we talk about in more functional ways, 
can ultimately reduce down to large networks of neural
systems, 
and that in turn will ultimately reduce down to 
the specific behaviors of the specific neurons that we're looking
at.

4. parts of brain

So, let's talk about the different parts of the brain and what they
do. 
Parts of the brain are functionalized for different purposes, 
they do different things. 
Which is why damage to different parts of the brain has
different effects. 
It's why when you look at an fMRI scan or 
PET scan or some something that records neural activity, 
you could figure out based on the location of the activity what's
going on. 
So, the first thing to realize is I'm talking about the brain, 
but I'd be more precise and more 
inclusive if I talked about the brain and parts of the spinal cord. 
So, you don't need your brain for everything. 
There're certain activities we do that can happen without a
brain. 
Like sucking in newborns or pulling your limb back to withdraw
from pain or vomiting. 
But for everything else we talk about in this course, 
we'll really be talking about the brain. 
So, some of the structures of the brain that are highly relevant
are called subcortical, 
which means they're below the cortex, 
which means they're in the center of the brain. 
This includes part of the brain like the medulla, 
which control certain automatic function like your heart rate, 
your blood pressure, swallowing, and so on. 
It includes the cerebellum, 
which is involved in body balance and muscle coordination. 
It contains about 30 billion neurons. 
So, this isn't small potatoes. 
The hypothalamus, which is involved in 
feeding and sex and thirst and different appetites. 
We're going to talk about emotions or visceral desires, 
we'll return to those parts of the brain. 
But for the aspects of psychology that are distinctive for us, 
that make us human, 
we're mostly focused on the outer layer, the cerebral cortex. 
So, the cerebral cortex it is all crumpled up. 
If you were to take a brain, 
pull out the cortex and straighten it out, 
like you're removing a rug you got from 
the trunk of your car and you have to straighten it out, 
it's about two feet square. 
So, it's lot of crumpling to get it in. 
It's about three millimeters thick. 
This is where the action is. 
This is where at least for the things I'm interested in, 
this is where it takes place. 
Is where reasoning and language and complex perception
comes from. 
Fish don't have any cerebral cortex, 
reptiles and birds have a little bit, 
but primates, including humans, have a lot. 
When you look at the cortex, you'll see it has two halves. 
It has a left half and a right half. 
For each of these halves, when you look at it, 
you can demarcate the brain, 
the cortex into different lobes. 
There's going from your forehead and swooping to the back. 
You have the frontal lobe conveniently enough on the front. 
The parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, 
and the temporal lobe. 
Each of these lobes, 
there's different things, which we'll talk about in a bit. 
Another thing about the cortex though which is super
interesting, 
is that it includes maps. 
What I mean by this is it includes topographical maps where 
two things that are close together in the brain are similarly close
together in the body. 
So, there is a motor area where if you were to shock, 
parts of that brain, 
parts of the body would twitch accordingly. 
Just like you'd expect, 
the middle finger is close to the thumb which is closer to elbow. 
If it's close in the real-world and your body it's close to 
the brain and there is a primary somatosensory area, 
which is the sense organs. 
There if you have somebody in the operating table and you
shocked people, 
they would experience things, they might experience a sound
or 
a flash of light or a touch. 
In fact, in the occipital lobe, 
you have a map for vision and in the temporal lobe, 
you have a map for sound. 
What's really cool is, 
I said the map is topographical, 
but the size of the brain areas don't correspond to the size of
the actual body areas, 
but rather to the extent to which there's motor or sensory
function. 
So, artists have drawn pictures of people if 
their body was proportioned to the extent that their brain was. 
You'd see the trunk of the body is relatively small, 
but their hands are enormous and the face is 
enormous because there's a whole lot of sensation. 
There is much more sensation going on in your hand 
than in your whole back even though the back is physically
apart. 
So, part of the cortex is these projection areas. 
But less than a quarter of the cortex contains projection areas. 
As I said, the rest is involved with the cool stuff. 
With language, with reasoning, 
with moral thoughts, and so on. 
Then the question comes in, 
how do we know this? 
How do we know what parts of the brain do what, 
what parts of the brain are involved, and why? 
There's different answers. 
So, one answer is we can scan the brain. 
We can use MRI, which is a high frequency magnetic field, 
to look at the activity of the brain, 
what parts are active when people do different things. 
We can also look at so-called natural experiments 
when people have tumors or strokes or motorcycle accidents. 
In damaged part of your brain and we can ask the question, 
what damage to which parts of the brain correspond to damage
to which functions? 
Through these different methods, 
we've learned about the different parts of the brain and what
they do. 
We could talk about some certain specific things that can go 
wrong due to brain damage or stroke or trauma. 
So, for instance, there's Apraxia. 
Apraxia is problems of actions. 
So, you're unable to do an action like waving goodbye 
or picking up before or can bring some food to your mouth. 
You're not paralyze. 
You can make the movements if you have to, 
but you can't coordinate these basic movements into complex
actions. There's Agnosia. 
Agnosia is a disorders of perception. 
And they're not like you can't see, 
but you can't recognize. 
Some is called psychic blindness. 
People of various forms of Agnosia can describe a picture in
terms of it's part, 
but can't recognize the objects that are being depicted. 
That's a form of visual Agnosia There's also a specific
Prosopagnosia, 
where you can't recognize faces. 
Oliver Sacks wrote a wonderful book 
many years ago called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a
Hat. 
This was a series of profiles of people who had surprising
neurological disorders and 
the title case of the book was 
a man who actually had such an inability to recognize faces, 
he couldn't distinguishes his wife's face from that of a hat. 
Milder forms of Prosopagnosia, 
which some people suffer from and to be honest, 
I got a little bit of some terrible faces. 
Is that you could recognize faces as faces, 
but you can't recognize whose face they 
are and it's very hard for you to recognize people. 
There's problems of sensory neglect. 
You get disorders that block out one part of the world. 
You might have damage to parts of your brain that 
would block out the left side of the world. 
It's not just the sort of physical thing, 
when you ask somebody with such a disorder to draw clock for
instance, 
they'll put all the numbers from one to 12 on the right side of the
clock. 
Is as if they don't think of the left side of the world again. 
So, maybe it's not even a sensory problem, 
but an attentional problem. 
There's Aphasia, which refers to disorders of language. 
Some forms of aphasia are expressive like a Broca's Aphasia, 
where you can't really speak. 
A famous case of somebody who can only use the word tan, 
would say tan, tan, 
tan, but couldn't say anything else. 
Or then there's something that's called Receptive Aphasia, 
where you can speak although what you say doesn't make
much sense, 
but also you have a terrible time understanding other people. 
Then there's all sorts of other disorders. 
There's the disorder which we talked about with regard to 
Phineas Gage and various forms of it. 
Where damage to your brain, 
it's debatable whether this is true Phineas Gage, 
but there are other cases where it's much more clear. 
Cause you to lose your moral sense, 
your sense of right and wrong, 
your ability to control yourself, 
to restrain yourself perhaps your conscience. 
Now, we're going to talk about all of these things through 
the course but the moral here is that, 
a, there's some localization of function. 
There's some sense in which it correspond to different brain
areas. 
B, again, this is an argument against dualism. 
We can see that in that anyone who argued that 
the mind isn't the brain would be hard-pressed to 
explain why damage to the brain seems to affect 
some very intimate and very important aspects of ourselves.

5, our two brains

We've talked now about the parts of the brain, 
a little bit about what the different parts do, 
and let's end by talking about the brain as a whole. 
So, if you just look at the brain, 
if you remove it from somebody's head and put it on your table, 
it looks symmetrical, but it's actually not. 
So, this final topic is about what's called lateralization, 
which is about the difference between the two halves of the
brain; 
the right half and the left half. 
It's long been known that there's a difference between right and
left. 
We're not symmetrical creatures. 
Most people are right-handed, 
meaning that they do a lot of 
their motor control and they are most fluid and capable like 
right hand writing with their right hand and as minority people
are left-handed. 
And then, some people are evenly mixed, 
ambidextrous, right and left. 
People who are right-handed for 
the most part have language in the left half of their brain, 
and people who are left-handed are more evenly mixed. 
Some people have in the right side of brain, 
others in the left side of the brain. 
So the cool thing is that, 
most functions of your brain are duplicated. 
So, a lot of times when you hear somebody say on the right
side of the brain, 
the left side of their brain, 
and right brain and left brain, 
a lot of what people say about that is total nonsense. 
Most of the functions of the brain are on both sides and to a
large extent, 
it's sort of more of an issue of dominance or 
greater potential on one side to another than an absolute
difference. 
But as sort of common wisdom goes, 
the left brain is more associated with a written language, 
and spoken language, with a reasoning, 
and logic, and science, 
and the right brain is more associated with insight, 
and imagination, and music. 
So, we have these two halves of the brain and normally they're
in coordination, 
but they deal with the world in different ways. 
So, one thing worth noting in any discussion of the halves of 
the brain is that it works on a principle of contralateral
organization, 
which is an awful technical term, 
but what it means is that your right brain sees the left side of
the world, 
the left visual field, 
and the left brain sees the right side of the world. 
It just works out that the brain has 
this crossover effect where each half of 
the brain is looking towards the opposite half of the world. 
And similarly for motor control, 
your right hemisphere controls the left side of body, 
your left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. 
Now, you might say, "Well, 
this is ridiculous because I am one person and not two people. 
I can understand language and appreciate art. 
I see the world as a coherent scene. 
I don't see the world with half of me and 
see the other half of the world with the other half of me." 
But that's because the two halves of the brain are in constant
immediate conversation. 
It's through the corpus callosum, 
and the corpus callosum is a network of 
neurons that connect one half of the brain with the other half. 
And this is what allows sensory 
information that's received on the left side of the brain for
instance, 
to be perceived in the right side of the brain. 
It's what allows the left side of the brain to control 
the motor actions on the right side of the body because it could 
send instructions over to the right side of the brain to do it. 
In fact, you can see in some clever experiments the strange
organization of the brain. 
So for instance, if you flash on 
the screen very quickly something on the right side of the
body, 
you're quicker to name it than if it's flash on the left side of the
body. 
Why would that be? Well, think about. 
If it's flash on the right side of the body, 
it's immediately perceived by the left hemisphere. 
The left hemispheres were spoken languages so you say, 
"Oh it's a cup, it's an apple." 
If it's flash on the left side of the body, 
for a fraction of an instance delay, 
it has to crossover to the left side of the brain. 
And you'll never see this in everyday life, 
the time differences are just too small. 
But in a psychology lab, 
you can see this. 
Now, what becomes really interesting is that for almost
everybody, 
the two halves of the brain are in constant conversation, but not
everybody. 
So, a while ago, 
people with severe epilepsy, 
they would cut the corpus callosum. 
Epilepsy could be viewed as an electrical storm in the brain, 
the corpus callosum causes the brain to communicate from one
half to another. 
So cutting the corpus callosum in some way, 
the idea would be to isolate and shrink the electrical storms. 
And so, people did work on. 
What they did is this very severe form of 
surgery and people with terrible cases of epilepsy. 
And the consequence which they didn't anticipate is all of a 
sudden you break one person off into two to some extent. 
You have a left side of the brain which does 
the talking and the right side of the brain which does a lot of
other things, 
which appreciates music, and space, and so on. 
And the idea is that in some sense, 
you've taken a person and now you have two, 
one half of them who can speak and articulate their wishes, 
the other that can't. 
And making sense of this, what this means, 
what this does to a person leads to 
philosophical questions that fall outside the scope of this
course.

6.a bit humility

We've talked a little bit about materialism. 
Why psychologists believe and then some of the evidence for
it, 
and then we've taken a quick tour of the brain, 
but the broader gist of things is what I want to return 
to and this is that the current view by psychologists, 
and neuroscientists, and other scientists bolstered by a lot 
of evidence is that dualism is wrong. 
The mind is the brain. 
There's not two substances, there is one, 
and I want to remind you how radical this is because I want
people to worry about it. 
I worry about it and I want people to worry along with me. 
So, for instance, you might believe in spiritual beings and 
supernatural beings with consciousness but no bodies, like
gods. 
If materialism is right, 
not only don't we have souls but maybe there's no such thing
as souls, 
or to put it differently there's no such thing as mental life
separate from the body. 
More to the point, 
maybe you were hoping that when your body dies, 
when you get very older, 
or you get hit by a bus, 
or whatever, you'll live on. 
You'll go to heaven. You'll go to a spirit world, or get
reincarnated, 
or whatever, and psychologists 
and neuroscientists that they speak honestly would say, "That's
crazy." 
You, your memories, your will, 
whatever makes you you is your physical brain 
and when your physical brain goes away so do you. 
So, people have to figure out what to make of it. 
What I want to close with though, 
since this all sounds not only disturbing but extremely arrogant, 
the idea that scientists are dictating the answer to the most
deep questions of all, 
is I want to end with two notes of humility: the first is, 
the conception of the mind that fits very well with 
the materialist view I presented is that 
the mind is an information processor, it's a computer, 
and we treat the brain as the physical aspect of the hardware
and our mental lives, 
the ideas, our processes, our heuristics, 
our algorithms as the software, 
as the programs that this hardware runs. 
This way of looking at things, 
I think works extremely well when it comes to 
activities like face recognition, language, motor control, 
logic and so on, 
but there still remains what the philosopher 
David Chalmers has called the hard problem of
consciousness. 
The feeling of what it is to slamming your hand in a car door, 
or eat scrambled eggs with hot sauce, 
or have an orgasm, 
or grieve for the death of your friend, 
or et cetera., et cetera., et cetera. 
These feelings, the feeling of what it's like, 
the qualia that many people believe can't be simulated on a
computer, 
and many people wonder whether this could be truly the activity
of the brain. 
If it's true, as I think it is true, 
that even these most qualitative experiences are the product of
brain activities, 
I think we should admit that we don't exactly know how this
happens. 
There's a quote by Thomas Huxley: "How is it that anything so
remarkable as 
a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating
nervous tissue. 
That question is just as unaccountable as 
the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." 
Huxley is saying it seems like magic. 
How a physical structure irritated by 
neurotransmitters swooshing back and forth and electrical
signals running across neurons, 
how that gives rise to feelings is a mystery, 
it seems like magic, and I think he's right. 
I think we know that as the product of the brain, 
but to be honest we don't know how. 
The second bit of humility involves the fact 
that materialism poses a mechanistic conception of mental life, 
but a lot of us, both as scholars but also as people, 
are concerned with what you could call humanist values. 
Values like the notion of moral responsibility: the idea we have
free will, 
that the idea that we're responsible for our actions, 
the idea that there's such a thing in the world has intrinsic
value, 
the idea that there's such a thing in the world perhaps as
spiritual value. 
For some people it's very hard to reconcile this with the idea
that we're merely brains, 
and there's two ways to react: one can simply reject humanist
values, 
and I know philosophers and psychologists 
who confidently assert there's no such thing as free will, 
there's no such thing as morality, 
there's no such thing as anything higher or spiritual. 
I know many more people who reject the science, 
who say that, "Look, 
if neuroscience is going to tell me that my decisions, 
my activities are nothing more than neural firings, 
then to hell with neuroscience." 
My own view is that these two things can be reconciled. 
I don't think it's easy, 
but I think that is possible to 
reconcile a mechanistic conception of human life with humanist
values, 
and I'll return to this issue over and over again in the course, 
and in my final lecture I want to go back to it and try to present 
a little bit more detail what I mean and how this reconciliation
can be defended.

3. defense mechanisms
So, suppose you survive these developmental stages and
you're now an adult, 
and you're not out of the woods yet, 
there are all sorts of challenges and problems you're faced
with. 
One problem is that your Id is sending up all sorts of desires, 
all sorts of weird sick stuff, 
sexual and violent, and these are forbidden by the super ego. 
It's not merely that you can't act upon them, 
so you shouldn't be thinking them, 
and so they get pushed down or repressed. 
You could even imagine a sort of a metaphor of you pushing
down something, 
like some water spraying out from leaks on 
a floor and you're jamming towels over it or something like that. 
Some of this repressed stuff, 
as in my fine metaphor, 
spills out, you can't contain everything. 
For Freud, it spills out in jokes and slips of the tongue and in
dreams. 
But also for Freud, 
there are other ways to cope with these desires. 
There's other ways to repress 
them and these are what Freud described as defense
mechanisms. 
They defend the ego from this terrible stuff that's coming out
from the Id, 
and some of these you may be familiar with. 
We tend to use them in everyday language, 
another example of Freud's influence. 
There's displacement, where you redirect shameful thoughts to
more appropriate targets. 
You can imagine a boy who hates his father, 
and that's really unacceptable, 
you shouldn't hate your father. 
So instead, he bullies another kid or kicks the dog. 
He turns his anger and his hatred towards 
his father to a more appropriate and more acceptable target. 
So, there's sublimation. 
Sublimation you take desires that are 
unacceptable and you displace them to more valuable
activities. 
So for instance, somebody who has a strong sexual desires of
forbiddens might 
devote a lot of energy to his or her work or studies. 
There's projection. Projection is reducing anxiety by taking 
these impulses you have that you're ashamed of and attributing
them to somebody else. 
So, imagine a woman with strong homosexual desires, 
and because of how she was raised, 
her super ego tells her these are unacceptable, they're
inappropriate. 
So she becomes unconscious of them. 
But she comes to believe that there are other women are
sexually drawn to her. 
Or you may really dislike somebody you shouldn't dislike, 
and then come to a conclusion, "Oh my gosh, 
this person must hate me." 
Because your own shameful feelings are unacceptable, 
you will project them onto somebody else. 
There's rationalization, where you have certain anxiety-
producing thoughts 
and you reason them away into more acceptable ways. 
So for instance, somebody might get pleasure, 
a father may get pleasure physically punishing his children. 
But nobody wants to think that of themselves. 
So the way he describes it to himself, 
the way he really believes it at the level of the self, 
the ego is that he's doing it for their own good. 
You know in general, a lot of the bad things we do, we
rationalize. 
There's regression, and you see this in children where the idea
is under 
certain forms of stress or stressful desires and stressful
impulses from the Id, 
you might retreat to a mode of behavior that's characteristic of
an earlier stage. 
So you see this in some sense a child might suddenly act like a
much younger child. 
Finally, there's reaction formation which is cool and of
unintuitive, 
where you replace threatening wishes and fantasies with their
opposites. 
So you might express and finally say, 
"Oh, I love this person. 
This person is my favorite person." 
As a way to mask the fact that you really don't love them at all, 
in fact, you hate them. 
Now, these defense mechanisms proposed by Freud are just
everyday life, 
we have them all the time. 
But sometimes, we fail to properly repress the impulses from
the Id, 
and then you get into some real problems. 
You get what Freud called hysteria. 
Hysteria according to Freud are these symptoms which showed
up quite 
often in Freud's time and maybe show up now only they're
manifested in different ways, 
such as blindness and deafness without any physical cause, 
paralysis, tremblings, panic attacks, 
gaps of memory including amnesia and so on. 
For Freud, these are nothing more than symptoms. 
They're ways in which we keep our impulses, 
our memories, our desires under lock and key. 
We keep forbidden stuff under lock and key. 
The simplest example, for instance, 
is you had this horrible event, 
something you did, something you saw and you just can't cope
with it, 
so you forget it. 
You have a form of amnesia, 
where you black it out. 
Freud believed that when these memories are recovered or
when the impulses come to light, 
there's what he called catharsis, 
an explosive release, an emotional release of insight. 
So, then when you're treating these hysterical symptoms, 
you'd want to get to them through ways that could 
facilitate this catharsis, facilitate this understanding. 
Freud originally tried to get at this through hypnosis, 
but later on moved to free association, 
which is a tool that sometimes used. 
The idea of free association is you give somebody a word and
he says something back, 
but because it's so speeded, 
they don't have time to censor it. 
Ideally, you get the true insight into what's working in their mind
without 
the filtering powers that the ego and the super ego have. 
So, for instance, a fanciful example is, 
we're in a session and I say, "Dog," and you say, 
"Cat," and I say, "Lunch," and you say, 
"Sandwich," and I say, 
"Mother," and you say, "Sex." 
Well, and then you're embarrassed. You offer resistance. 
You say, "Oh, I didn't mean to say that." 
You don't go to your next appointment. 
You get angry at the therapist. 
This is part of the dance of psychoanalysis. 
Freud used these methods and many others to explore inner
conflicts, 
and what goes on in psychoanalysis and 
its success at reading people is 
a topic that we're going to get to at the very end of this course.

4. scientific assessment of freud

So this has been a summary of Freud's theory focusing on the
major aspects. 
But as I said earlier, 
the scope of his theory is considerable. 
You're allowed to say what dreams for instance, 
arguing that they were a form of wish fulfillment and he 
distinguished what he called the Laden dream from the
manifest dream. 
The dream as it really is from a dream as experienced and
remembered, 
and talked a lot about the symbolism of dreams. 
So, dream interpretation is something which has had a very
very long tradition but 
Freud systematized it and to some extent adopted more of a
scientific perspective on it. 
Freud talked about myths in literature where he 
argued that often things like fairy tales expressed aspects of 
the unconscious and capture certain universal themes and he 
developed a theory of the origin of religion linking it to things
like 
a desire for a father figure and broader aspects of humanity 
connecting it to his general theory of where civilization comes
from. 
If you're interested in his works, 
it's a really rich body of ideas to explore. 
So, so far we've talked about what Freud said, 
but now let's address the question, 
how much of it's true and how much of it is good science? 
Because there's two ways to reject a theory, 
a theory could be wrong or could contain a lot of mistaken
claims. 
So for instance, if you thought that the disorders of 
schizophrenia or autism were caused by bad parenting, 
well that's a theory. 
It's certainly mistaken, there's too much evidence against it. 
But another problem of a theory is that it could be too vague to
test, 
it could just be story telling. 
One physicist famously derided the work of a colleague by
saying," He's not right, 
he's not even wrong", 
and what scientists aspire to do is to at least be wrong, 
to have theories that are such specificity and 
testability that they could be proven mistaken. 
Philosopher Karl Popper talked about this idea of the notion of
falsifiability. 
So he pointed out that, 
what distinguishes science from non-science, 
is that scientific predictions make strong claims 
about the world and run the risk of being proven false. 
That is, he argued, 
you know you're dealing with a science when there are ways to
prove its claims wrong. 
So, for instance suppose we were to make claims like this; 
damage to the part of the brain known as the hippocampus 
causes failures of implicit memory but not explicit memory. 
Or, everywhere in the world men should prefer on average, 
they have more sexual partners than women prefer. 
Or, exposure to violent television makes children more violent
or, 
ingestion of certain drugs makes the symptoms of
schizophrenia go away, 
are these true or false? 
Well each and every one of these claims we'll discuss later on
in 
the course and I'll also explain to you what implicit memory and
explicit memory are. 
But the point here is, 
these are the sorts of things that can be proven false. 
This is the stuff of science, 
these are interesting and substantive claims. 
I think very few philosophers today would agree with Popper's
claim that, 
falsifiability is the absolute criteria 
through which you can distinguish science from non-science. 
But what they would agree with is that if the claim is too 
vague to be proven false or too slippery to be proven false, 
then you may not be dealing with a scientific theory in the first
place. 
So I'm a Capricorn and here's a horoscope for my day, 
Your energy is focused on work today maybe a bit too much so
it's a good time to get 
a lot done for sure but try to make sure 
that your relationships don't suffer as a result. 
The problem with this horoscope isn't that it's wrong, 
it's that it's so vague it can't be wrong depending on what you
mean by work. 
There's always going to be something to be said for 
your energies focused too much on work, 
and advice is so banal and empty that there's 
nothing that can happen or you could say."Oh that 
was bad advice I shouldn't have done that." 
I kind of prefer the horoscopes I got from the satirical
magazine, 
The Onion "There's no worse fate than dying alone. 
Thankfully you'll be surrounded by hundreds of airline
passengers when it happens." 
and part of the humor of this, 
besides this unremitting grimness and honesty, 
is that it's specific. 
It's a specific horoscope and you never see that, 
and this is of course the sort of thing which could be wrong. 
If a scientist told me they had a theory of 
future behavior and they predicted how people go on a diet and
then they were right, 
I'd say that's credible science. 
So take this back to Freud, 
one of the main accusations of Freudian theory is that it's
unfalsifiable. 
It's based a lot on anecdotes, 
on descriptions of clinical events and in fact 
the therapeutic environment itself has a sort of unfalsifiability to
it. 
So imagine dealing with a therapist and your therapist, 
suppose you're lucky enough to be treated by Freud himself
says you hate your mother and 
if the patient says "Oh wow what an insight that's 
true" the therapist will say," Well I'm right, this supports me". 
But suppose the therapists of those Freud said you 
hate your mother and the patient is outraged "No I don't. 
That's horrible." 
Freud could say,"Well, your anger shows this idea is painful for
you, 
you have repressed it from consciousness. 
I am right", and when dealing with somebody who has a
Freudian explanation, 
here's the ultimate cause of your problems or of your anxiety. 
Harder the problem is, 
it's not clear what could ever prove that explanation wrong. 
If you can't prove it wrong, 
it's not science and more to the point, 
it's not very interesting. 
Now to be fair, 
a lot of Freudian's and a lot of the scholars who have followed
and been influenced by 
Freud's ideas have tried to take his ideas 
and turn them into empirical falsifiable claims, 
and if you think about a lot of what we talked about in this
lecture, 
it does admit of testing. 
So for instance, if Freud's right, 
your experience of breastfeeding should be 
a reliable predictor of your personality later on in life. 
If Freud is right, your experience of toilet training should be 
a reliable predictor of your experience later in life. 
If Freud is right, 
whether or not you're raised by one parent or two, 
whether or not you're raised by a man and woman or two men, 
two women should have a profound effect on the Electra
complex, 
the Oedipus complex and so on. 
Freud made specific claims about the origin of 
sexual preference and he certainly made a lot of claims about
success of psychoanalysis. 
So to some extent a lot of Freudian's would say, 
" The proof is in the pudding, 
psychoanalysis rests on a Freudian analysis of what's going
on", 
and so if the Freudian analysis is correct you would expect this
method of treatment to 
be uniquely powerful in curing people's problems. 
Unfortunately most people believe that it isn't.
5. Taking freud seriously
Although psychoanalysis has some fans and somebody would 
argued that it is useful in certain ways. 
It really is no longer a preferred treatment for 
psychological problems and more generally, 
very few of the specific Freudian claims 
about toilet training for instance have proven correct. 
This is why departments in universities and research
laboratories, 
Freudian ideas are just not talked about that much. 
Somebody will come to see me at Yale and they'd say, 
"What kind of courses on Freud do you offer?", 
and I'll tell them the truth, which is we don't offer any. 
In a university, Freud is discussed more in 
an English department than a Psychology department. 
His ideas, his specific claims are just not thought to be either 
scientific enough or true enough to admit of careful study and
focus. 
For a psychology student taking the psychology major at Yale, 
this is probably all Freud they're ever going to hear. 
So, Freudian theory isn't taken that 
seriously within contemporary psychological research. 
Why do we spend so much time talking a little? 
One of a few reasons. 
First, Freud has had an extraordinary influence. 
He's had an extraordinary influence on psychology particularly
clinical psychology, 
and when we turn to talk in the next lecture about Skinner and
behaviorism, 
we can best understand that research tradition as a reaction at
least in part to Freud. 
More than that, Freud has had a tremendous influence about
how 
all of us psychologists and non-psychologists think about the
mind. 
A second reason is that although most of Freudian ideas are
not taken seriously, 
Freud had a lot to say. 
I think Freud was a brilliant, 
and important, and very perceptive scholar, 
and even if we reject most of his ideas, 
it may well be that a few of them have staying power. 
For instance, Freud's ideas about dreams have a Go Bag, 
scholars will disagree quite a bit over the extent to which
dreams mean things, 
but many scientists believe that the idea that dreams captures, 
I'm sorry hidden meaning. 
Again, an old idea but something that Freud made a lot of, 
has quite a bit of merit. 
Other neuroscientists try to relate Freud's constructs of the id, 
the ego, and the super-ego to specific parts of the brain. 
I don't think you can go wrong. 
Reading Freud with an idea towards cynically, 
and carefully, and analytically asking, "Okay. 
A lot of this is bogus." 
But some of it might be valuable and we should 
look carefully to see what parts of it we want to keep. 
Most of all, the grand idea of Freud, 
the idea of a dynamic unconscious is intact. 
In fact, in the lectures that follow, 
we will discuss all sorts of aspects of the mind; 
language, and prejudice, and development, and emotions. 
It's going to be a continuing theme how much of what we're
talking about, 
how much that's really of interest lies 
inaccessible to the conscious mind but actually beneath the
surface