CUNY

Interactive Brain Tutorials

Jon Horvitz
Principles of Behavioral Neuroscience textbook cover

This is the landing page for fourteen interactive neuroscience tutorials on communication between neurons, memory and learning, sleep, attention, addiction, and other topics in brain, mind, and behavior.

For those using Principles of Behavioral Neuroscience: the tutorials will help you consolidate material from each chapter. You'll find pointers back to relevant sections of the book along the way.

If you're here for your own learning goals, we hope you'll find these tutorials interesting and useful in your neuroscience journey.

Interactive tutorials

If you're not sure where to begin, Chapter 1: Nervous Systems is the natural starting point.
  1. Nervous Systems — An overview of the nervous system's major structures, from the spinal cord to the brainstem , up through subcortical regions and the cerebral cortex. The various brain regions contribute and interact to produce sensation, thought, emotion, and behavior.
  2. How Neurons Work — How individual neurons communicate through release of neurotransmitters that excite and inhibit receiving neurons.
  3. Sensory Systems — How the brain processes information during vision, hearing, touch, and other senses, with an emphasis on vision.
  4. Movement (coming soon) — How signals from the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, basal ganglia, and cerebellum allow us to generate voluntary and automatic movements.
  5. Sleeping, Waking and Circadian Rhythms (coming soon) — The brain's internal clock, slow-wave sleep and dreaming, and what's known about the neural bases of sleep disorders.
  6. Hunger (coming soon) — The physiological and neural signals that govern hunger and satiety, as well as obesity, anorexia and other disorders of weight regulation.
  7. Sex (coming soon) — The hormonal and neural basis of sexual development, behavior, sexual preference, and gender identity.
  8. Brain Development and Plasticity (coming soon) — How the nervous system develops from before birth through adulthood, and how experience reshapes the brain across the lifespan.
  9. Long-Term Learning and Memory (coming soon) — What are the different types of learning and memory? How does the brain store memories and retrieve them?
  10. Attention and Working Memory (coming soon) — How does the brain focus on particular objects from among all those around us? How do we hold information about an object in mind after it is no longer present?
  11. Reward, Reinforcement, and Addiction (coming soon) — The brain's reward circuitry, including the role of dopamine in natural rewards and addiction to drugs.
  12. Stress, Fear, and Anxiety (coming soon) — How does the brain and the periphery of the body respond to stress and threat? What goes wrong in anxiety disorders.
  13. Neuropathology in Neurology and Psychiatry (coming soon) — An overview of four major neurological and psychiatric conditions: depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease.
  14. Higher Cognitive Function (coming soon) — What are the specialized functions of the two hemispheres of the brain? How does the brain produce and understand language? What do we know about the neuroscience of self-reflective thought and predicting the intentions and behaviors of others.