neurotaylor

Into the brave new world … of video

Today I’m trying a new experiment. New for me, at least, and scary, though no doubt many of you will be past masters at it. I’m posting a video on YouTube. It’s the first of a planned series of short, simple talks about neuroscience, and it’s an introductory guide to what’s where in human brains.

My hope is that it will be useful to students starting out, and to others interested in learning more about brains and the methods used to study them. If you’d like to look a little beyond the headlines and pretty pictures of fMRI, for instance, there’ll be a talk on that coming soon.

I’ve tried to keep the talks short, clear, and as fluent as possible, although, as I soon found out, it’s extremely difficult to talk coherently for minutes at a time about any subject, even one you know well.

Finally, the biggest disadvantage to this project, from my point of view, is that it’s video. My childish sympathy for the old idea that photographing someone stole their soul has been overlaid in adulthood by a properly scientific doubt as to whether people have souls – but I retain the child’s dislike of being imaged. However, communication works better when you can see the communicator. And this is such an important topic to communicate. So here goes.