Minor in Consciousness

Consciousness defines our existence - the world we perceive, awareness of inner thoughts and feelings, and our place in the universe. The course reviews opinions and theories from ancient times to present day, ranging from consciousness as a fundamental property of reality, to computation among brain neurons. We consider philosophical, neurobiological, computational, electromagnetic, quantum, astrobiological and cosmological theories of consciousness, with varying degrees of explanatory power, testability and confirmation. The course will include regular lectures by Professor Hameroff along with selected guest presentations, videos, readings, special demonstrations, and group projects.

The main goal is to bring students into contact with scholars in a range of disciplines with different kinds of relevant expertise. The twice-weekly format involves your spending time with each of them only, so you and they will be free to interact. We regularly include distinguished presenters from outside the university.

This course critically explores the categories of religion, spirituality, and the sacred as they relate to American Indian communities, traditions, lifeways, histories, narratives, ceremony, and land. Focusing on both the plurality of indigenous lifeways and shared characteristics, some major topics that will be examined include the role of religion both in the colonization of Native people as well as in resistance to colonization, the importance of land/place/ecosystem and conceptions of sacred space, and issues of religious freedom and the fight for traditional land. Throughout we will analyze the efficacy of the terms \"religion\" and \"spirituality\" as well as engage with concerns regarding the academic study of Native American religions more broadly.

This course covers the major themes and issues in Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on philosophical foundations, cognitive architecture, and modeling approaches.

This course will introduce students to experimental methods in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience including computer modeling and selected experimental techniques, which may include neuroimaging, measurement of event-related potentials, eye tracking, and monitoring of autonomic nervous system function.

The goal of this class is to provide an introduction to the art of computational modeling in Cognitive Science using the Matlab programming language. Topics will include, how we model learning and simple decisions, how we connect computational models to observed experimental data (such as choices and neural activations) and how we can use modeling to design better experiments to test complex hypotheses.

The class will be very much a \"hands on\" class, every week students will create a different model, starting in class and finishing at home. At the end, students should be able build a computational model from scratch, fit a model to data and determine which of a set of models best fits the observed experimental data.

The emotional, physical and spiritual demands of the caring and health professions are significant. Students are introduced to the importance of wellness and self-care practices as they consider careers in the helping professions. This course will explore the impact of cultivating compassion vs. empathy in working with clients/patients, as well as offer students an opportunity to cultivate a wellness/self-care practice in their own lives. The course culminates in a research paper on the student's selected wellness/self-care practice.

Major forms of Buddhist meditation from both the South Asian and East Asian traditions, with emphasis on the nature of meditation as a variety of religious experience.

This course examines the ways in which computing and information science support and facilitate the production and creation of art in current society. A particular focus of the course will be to discuss how artists have used advances in technology and computing capacity to explore new ways of making art, and to investigate the relationships between technical innovation and the artistic process.

This course will provide the student with the information and experience necessary for the creation and manipulation of digital audio. Students will have the opportunity to experience the music-making process with the technology tools and techniques that are common in both home and professional studios. The class will make use of a variety of software packages designed for contemporary music production, explaining the universal techniques and concepts that run through all major software programs. Topics will include musical analysis, MIDI control, synthesis techniques, audio editing, and audio mixing. Lab assignments will emphasize hands-on experience working with musical hardware and software to provide the necessary skills to create music based on today's musical styles. The course provides the foundation for further study, creative applications, and personal expression.

The methods and tools of Artificial Intelligence used to provide systems with the ability to autonomously problem solve and reason with uncertain information. Topics include: problem solving (search spaces, uninformed and informed search, games, constraint satisfaction), principles of knowledge representation and reasoning (propositional and first-order logic, logical inference, planning), and representing and reasoning with uncertainty (Bayesian networks, probabilistic inference, decision theory).

Introduction to language processing. The psychological processes involved in the comprehension and production of sounds, words, and sentences. Other topics may include language breakdown and acquisition, brain and language, and bilingual processing.

This course is an introduction to several core topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. The course falls naturally into three parts. The first part will begin with an overview of core concepts in the philosophy of mental health/illness, which will be followed by a brief history of philosophical approaches to psychopathology. The second part of the course will be concerned with philosophical issues associated with particular types of psychopathology, such as psychosis, depression, mania, personality disorders, and addiction. The third and final part of the course will cover specific issues at the intersection of psychopathology and particular areas of philosophy, such as ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. These intersecting issues include (respectively): moral/criminal responsibility of the mentally ill, causes, laws and reasons in psychiatric etiology, and personal identity issues associated with mental illness.

Introduction to language processing. The psychological processes involved in the comprehension and production of sounds, words, and sentences. Other topics may include language breakdown and acquisition, brain and language, and bilingual processing.

This course is, in essence, a user guide to your brain. How do you store a lifetime of memories, make difficult decisions, and understand and generate language? What factors drive how you perceive the world and engage in a wide range of motor actions from taking a single step to dancing? What enables you to feel emotions and understand what others are thinking? The main objective of this course is for you to advance your knowledge of how the brain supports these cognitive abilities and others. Major topics will include sensation and perception, motor control, attention, learning and memory, language, executive functions, and social cognition. To cover these topics, you will be exposed to multiple methods for studying the brain, including a variety of modern brain imaging techniques as well as examination of individuals with brain lesions.
 

Cognitive neuroscience is one of the most fascinating and active fields of research today. By the end of this course, we hope that you will have a better understanding of this rapidly advancing field, what we presently know, and what big questions are still under scientific investigation.

Illusions and magic are entertaining, but they also reveal significantly about the human cognition. That is, while engineered illusions use our own mind's intrinsic properties against ourselves, fooling us every time even when we know full well that we are being 'tricked', this also leads to scientific investigations that elucidate how the mind works. The course will explore the dynamic integration between these awe-inspiring perceptual illusions and magic effects, and the neural and psychological mechanisms involved. For example, how does redirected of visual attention work in a magic performance and how can this be studied scientifically. What neural mechanisms are involved in seeing a real versus make-belief object? We will survey a number of magic tricks and perceptual illusions. Students will have the opportunity to apply acquired knowledge to independently explore other illusions and real-world applications.

Introduction to research concerning how we perceive the external world through our senses of vision, audition, smell, taste and touch, with an emphasis on vision.

This course is a survey of psychological theory and research investigating religious beliefs, experiences, and practices.

Cognition collectively refers to a variety of higher mental processes that you use on a daily basis to think, perceive, remember, plan, and act. Cognition is central to your identity and provides you with incredible freedom of thought, allowing you to \"mentally time travel\" into the past and the future, to think creatively and problem solve, to select what you attend to and alter how you perceive your environment, to create language, and to place yourself in \"another person's shoes.\" The goal of this course is to provide you with a deeper understanding of how some of these higher mental processes work, and how they are prone to errors. This course will focus on real world examples of cognition at work. This will include cognitive demands of daily experience, such as focusing attention on a lecture and remembering to follow through with future plans. We also will discuss cognition in relation to hot topics in the public eye, including fake news, eyewitness testimony, return to play decisions in sports, substance use, and Alzheimer's disease. Through this course you will acquire knowledge that you can apply to your everyday life, and you will be better prepared for your future career and life challenges that can affect cognition.

Introduction to language processing. The psychological processes involved in the comprehension and production of sounds, words, and sentences. Other topics may include language breakdown and acquisition, brain and language, and bilingual processing.

This course is a survey of psychological theory and research investigating religious beliefs, experiences, and practices.

This course critically explores the categories of religion, spirituality, and the sacred as they relate to American Indian communities, traditions, lifeways, histories, narratives, ceremony, and land. Focusing on both the plurality of indigenous lifeways and shared characteristics, some major topics that will be examined include the role of religion both in the colonization of Native people as well as in resistance to colonization, the importance of land/place/ecosystem and conceptions of sacred space, and issues of religious freedom and the fight for traditional land. Throughout we will analyze the efficacy of the terms religion and spirituality as well as engage with concerns regarding the academic study of Native American religions more broadly.

This course provides an introduction to mindfulness and other contemplative practices to facilitate coping with stress and enhancing engagement in a full life. Mindfulness involves cultivating non-judgmental awareness in each moment as it unfolds. Students will explore the background of mindfulness and other contemplative practices and have opportunities to engage with activities and practices to support the development of their own resources to support stress management and resilience.

This course provides an introduction to mindfulness based study tools and practices to facilitate attentional focus and enhanced learning in all studies. Mindfulness involves cultivating non-judgmental awareness in each moment as it unfolds. Students will explore the background of mindfulness and other contemplative practices and have opportunities to engage with activities and practices to support the development of their own resources to support studying and learning.

This course provides an introduction to mindfulness based movement practices to facilitate coping with stress and enhancing engagement in a full life. Mindfulness involves cultivating non-judgmental awareness in each moment as it unfolds. Students will explore the background of mindfulness and specific movement based contemplative practices and have opportunities to engage with activities and practices to support the development of their own resources to support stress management and resilience.

This course explores key questions in astrobiology and planetary science about the origin and evolution of life on Earth and the possibility that such phenomena have arisen elsewhere in the Universe. We examine what it means for a planet to be alive at scales ranging from cellular processes up to global impacts of biological activity. We survey international space-exploration activities to search for life within the Solar System, throughout our Galaxy, and beyond.

This course is designed to introduce students to the history, teachings, and practice of Zen Buddhism in China, Japan, Korea and the United States. The course will discuss Zen from a variety of perspectives but will center around the question of the meaning of history. Zen is a tradition of Buddhism that claims to have inherited and to pass on, in an unbroken historical transmission from patriarch to patriarch, the living experience of the Buddha's enlightenment. The course will discuss how Zen's conception of its history is related to its identity as a special tradition within Buddhism, as well as its basic teachings on the primacy of enlightenment, the role of practice, the nature of the mind, and the limitations of language.

This course is an introduction to media and geography. Students will develop critical frames for evaluating how places are represented in media such as television, film, music videos, blogs, and advertisements.

An introduction to computational techniques and using a modern programming language to solve current problems drawn from science, technology, and the arts. Topics include control structures, elementary data structures, and effective program design and implementation techniques. Weekly laboratory.

Introduction to linguistic, psychological, philosophical and social aspects; meaning structures; meaning in the mind/brain; acquisition of word meaning; the differences between literal/figurative meaning; metaphors; meaning in social contexts, models of representation.

This course covers some of the central aspects of the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, and ongoing philosophical and scientific debates about those foundations. Course topics may include: the mind-body problem; the relationship between psychological and biological sciences; the mystery of subjective experience; emotions; innateness; rationality (and irrationality); nonhuman minds; artificial intelligence; and moral cognition. The course is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on both scientific and philosophical sources.

Students will explore and better understand the bases of thinking. They will become aware of how to detect and avoid decision manipulation traps. They will become more aware of understand the brains correlation between cognition and decision-making. Students will gain understanding on the evolution of cognition. Discovering the similarities and differences of human cognition and animal (especially primate) problem solving and communication.

This course focuses on one Big Question: \"How do afterlife beliefs affect the way we live?\" It builds connections among the humanities [Religious Studies and Philosophy], the social sciences [Anthropology, Psychology, and Law], and the natural sciences [Medicine] to explore the ways in which religious afterlife beliefs are approached from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Students will analyze a variety of religious afterlife beliefs through case studies, problem-based assignments, and reading/writing genres from the six disciplinary perspectives in order to tackle the Big Question as it relates to their personal, academic, and/or career aspirations.