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CNS/Bi 120: The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness

4-0-5, Spring 2009 -- WF 10:00am-11:30am in Broad 100

This wiki contains information related to Professor Christof Koch's CNS 120.

If you're looking for the lecture notes, you can find them on the lectures page. You'll need a password to download the slides.

See the links on the left hand side for navigating the website.

Click here to view videos of the class from 2003

Course Details

Course Description

What are the correlates of consciousness in the brain? The course provides a framework for addressing these questions from a scientific point of view. The course will focus on the neuronal correlates of visual consciousness, on clinical studies of consciousness, on the conscious sensation of free will and on Tononi's integrated information theory of consciousness.

Topics to be covered include the anatomy and physiology of the primate's visual system (retina, thalamus, the cerebral cortex), unconscious (zombie) processing in normal subjects as well as in sleep-walkers, temporal lobe epilepsy patients and other clinical conditions, the relationship between attention and consciousness, various pathologies of consciousness (neglect, blindsight, split-brain, prosopagnosia, frontal patients), time and consciousness, memory and consciousness, thinking and consciousness, the function of consciousness, free will and the perception of agency and complexity and consciousness.

The supreme aim of the class is to emphasize the empirical nature of the mind-body problem.

Course Requirements

Students who are taking CNS/Bi 120 for nine units of credit are required to

• Attend all lectures. There will be a 10 minute quiz at the beginning of each lecture, (except for the first one). The quizzes will cover material from previous lectures, in particular from the readings and from homeworks.
• Hand in five homeworks on time.

All students, whether taking the course on grades or pass/fail, must take all quizzes. If you can't attend a lecture, please let Prof. Koch know ahead of time - we will schedule a makeup quiz for you, if your absence is justified. We only allow two makeup quizzes at maximum.

Grading Policy

The letter grade will be based on the final score, which is the sum of homeworks (40%) and the quizzes (60%, i.e. 3-5% for each quiz) points. Eligible students can take the class on a pass/fail basis (you need 50% of the points to pass). We normalize the final scores by the highest score in class (that is, your score divided by the highest score in class), and convert it to letter grades as follows:

0-0.5 --> F

0.50001-0.625 --> D

0.62501-0.75 --> C

0.75001-0.875 --> B

0.87501-1 --> A