Brain, Mind, Behavior

There are many people who absolutely love our last block for the year, Brain, Mind, and Behavior. I have to say I am one of them. This is a much-anticipated course. In fact, 100 days before the course would begin, one of the course directors Dan Lowenstein came in to tell us to begin the countdown. He popped in when it was 30 days before the start of the block, and then again at 15 days. There's certainly been a lot of hype and expectation!

It's really been an awesome experience. You can tell that everyone involved in the course from the course directors to the administrators to the lecturers feels passionately about both the material and the way it is delivered. Even the introductory lecture, usually filled with logistics and routine, was fascinating. Dr. Lowenstein quoted Lao Tzu, had a clip of a ballet dancer, and showed artwork to describe how intricate and powerful the nervous system is. On the first day, they brought in a patient who had suffered a stroke. In interviewing the patient and demonstrating key examination features, we were drawn into the captivating yet bizarre things that can happen to the mind - an ability to comprehend language but not produce it, to flex one's hands but not extend them, the increased tendency to show emotions. We got to hear about his recovery since the stroke, about his family involvement, about the role of neurology.

There are several contests this block. Every day, we begin class extra early with a case of the day - several challenging questions involving a neurology or psychiatry case; we've had strokes, hydrocephalus, alien hand syndrome, and others so far. According to Stephanie, the person who wins gets a shirt saying, "I am a HUGE NERD." (Or something to that effect). The cases are quite interesting indeed.

Then there's a contest called the "Syllabus Perfectionism Award" which awards points to students who catch mistakes (content, grammar, typographical, anything) in the printed course reader (>1000 pages). When I took computer science from Eric Roberts, he was just putting out his book "Art and Science of Java" and he did the same thing for that course. Every mistake got you a ticket in a raffle at the end of the quarter, and the winner of the raffle got an automatic perfect score on the final. He got free labor of four hundred editors out of that class. I did manage to win a coding contest to net the automatic perfect score, so I got to sleep in on the morning of the test anyway. In any case, I am OCD enough that typographical errors in printed material really annoy me (and content errors are even worse), but I also procrastinate too much to catch any mistakes for the syllabus perfectionism award before someone else notices.