What are people most afraid of? What do our dreams mean? Are we natural-born racists?

What makes
us happy? What are the causes and cures of mental illness?

This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of
the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication,
learning, memory, decision-making, persuasion, emotions, and social behavior. We will look at how
these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in
the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

We hope you enjoy the format we've selected for this course which combines complex subject matter
with high-end animation. Learn more about the animator, Julia Veldman.

For all Yale learners: Once enrolled in a Coursera course or program, all forms of communication will be
sent from Coursera. Please note that you will never receive course communications through the mobile
application WhatsApp. Due to the popularity of WhatsApp, many learners have joined groups where
scams may be present. Please stay vigilant against scams by recognizing unknown numbers, requests for
money or personal information.

So here's where things begin for real. I want to welcome people to the course and I want to welcome
people to the first series of lectures, which is on the brain, on neuroscience. And I want to begin this
series of lectures and the course itself, with a story about a man named Phineas Gage, and an event that
happened to Gage in the summer of 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont.

So Gage was a blasting foreman working on a railway construction project and his job, at that time, was
to clear away rock so that they could lay down tracks. And to do so, his routine during those days, was
that he would bore a hole in the rocks. Inside the hole, he put blasting powder and a fuse in. Then he
would cover that up with dirt and sand and take a tamping iron, which he carried with him. A big piece
of steel looked like a javelin and uses it to tamp down the sand and dirt, so that later they could set the
fuse and cause the explosions.

Well one day, something didn't work. Nobody's exactly sure why, maybe he just forgot to put in the
sand and the dirt. But regardless, he put the tamping iron into the hole, the powder exploded. [SOUND]
The tamping iron shot away from his hand and went into his face. It entered the left side of Gage's jaw,
moving in an upward direction, it passed behind the left eye through the left side of the brain and it
went out the top of his skull and landed several feet away of the clutter. Now miraculously Gage wasn't
killed on the spot. He lost consciousness for a little bit, but then he staggered to his feet.

And in some regards, Gage was very lucky. So he underwent a series of operations, he had infections, he
got sick. At times, his life was at risk. But months later, he was, in certain regards, pretty much
recovered. He was able to see, he wasn't deaf, he wasn't paralyzed, he didn't lose the ability to speak or
understand language, he didn't lose his intellectual capacities in any simple way.
But in another sense Gage was very unlucky because Gage has been transformed by this incident.
Someone who knew Gage describes the transformation like this. Before the accident Gage was, quote
the most efficient and capable man, a man of temperate habits, considerable energy of character, a
sharp shrewd businessman.

After the accident, Gage was no longer Gage. He was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest
profanity manifesting but little deference for his fellows. He ended up losing his job. He traveled through
the states taking up different jobs, engaging in different relationships. And ultimately ended up in an
exhibit in a travelling circus, holding a tamping iron and telling people about this terrible story about
how it went through his head and went through his brain, and changed his life.

So, why am I telling you this story? Well, as I said, I want to begin the course by talking about the brain.
And the story of Phineas Gage illustrates something which we have abundant reason to believe, which is
that the brain is the source of mental life. And so damage to the brain can have profound effects on who
we are and what we are.

An idea here is nicely summarized by the Nobel prize winning biologist Francis Crick, he calls it the
Astonishing Hypothesis. As he writes, the Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your
sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no
more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Now this assembly of nerve cells is of course the brain, the brain and parts of the spinal cord, but we're
going to talk about the brain here.

And the idea then, as sometimes people like to put it the mind is the brain or that the mind is what the
brain does or the mental life emerges from the brain.

The official term for this is materialism that we are material beings. Everybody accepts that our arms
and legs and our heart and kidneys are made of the same sort of stuff as rabbits and automobiles and
cups. But the idea is that our mental life, what makes us special, our most intimate feelings and
thoughts also arise from these material things. And this the idea that makes possible the discipline of
neuroscience and much of psychology

We're talking about materialism, the idea that our mental life emerges from our physical brain. If you're
listening closely, if you're thinking about this, I hope you acknowledged that this is an odd and unnatural
view. I don't expect you to believe it, at least not at first. And in fact, for the most part, people are far
more attracted to the doctrine called "Dualism." Dualism is an idea that's been found in just about every
religion and every philosophy. It's made explicit in Plato, for instance. But I think the most thoughtful
and articulate defender of dualism was the philosopher, Rene Descartes. Descartes believed that
animals were material things. He thought that the doctrine of materialism was correct about non-
human animals. "But humans are different," Descartes argued. For humans, there's a duality. We
possess two sorts of things. We are composed of two sorts of things. We are in part material, but we're
also in part spiritual, separate, mental, psychological. In some way that doesn't reduce to the material.
He made two arguments for this, and they're both reasonably good arguments, at least quite persuasive
at his time, and have persuaded many people and continue to persuade many people. The first
arguments for a non-material nature is that humans are capable of doing things that no machine, no
material entity ever could. So, it might surprise you to hear this, but Descartes in the 17th century was
familiar with robots. He knew about the French Royal Gardens, which is like a 17th century Disneyland
or Euro Disney, which had robots that react when you approach them or when you step on certain
stones. For instance, you might approach Diana, and then Neptune would jump out from the bushes
holding a trident. This was done not of electricity, but with water. So, Descartes knew about these
robots, and Descartes asked, "Well, maybe we're such things, maybe we're just machines responding to
the environment." And he said that we can't be. He said maybe animals, non-human animals can be, but
human behavior is far more complicated, and variegated, and subtle to be explained in such simple
ways. We'll return to this point later on in the course when we talk about Noam Chomsky and Noam
Chomsky's critique of behaviorism, which argued that basically humans respond in a relatively reflexive
way to environmental stimuli. Descartes along with Chomsky said, "That can't be. Our behavior's far too
complicated for that. So, we can't be machines." His second argument is probably better now, and it's
based on intuition. And his claim was we don't feel like bodies. So, to put it more technically, he applied
what was called a method of doubt.

He asked the question, "What do we know for sure, and what can we question?" So, for instance, you
might believe you were born in such and so place. You could be wrong. You could be deceived. You
might believe that the Earth is thousands or millions of years old. But maybe the Earth was created 100
years ago and all the memories that your grandparents have of the past were just manufactured. You
might believe, said Descartes: that you live in a world of things, that you're sitting on a chair or there's a
wall in front of you or there's a computer near your hands. But Descartes observe that we often believe
such things when we're in dreams, but weren't mistaken. He observed that people who are mentally ill,
or were deranged in some way, might have such beliefs, but don't be mistaken. So, you could be wrong
that there's a physical world around you.

You could be wrong that there is a body that you have. This is an ancient concern of course, but it's best
articulated in the movie, The Matrix, which maintains that we think we're running around in the physical
world, but actually, with the lucky exception of our heroes like Neo and Trinity, we're actually just
plugged into some sort of system. Another version of this is that we're brains in a vat. If you were a
brain, just the brain sitting in a vat with electrical wires stimulating your experiences, you couldn't help.
Maybe you are such things. Modern-day philosophers for instance, will argue that there's an excellent
chance that we are simulations, we computer simulations. So, Descartes and people following Descartes
said, "There's a lot we can't be sure of. The things that we are seemingly most confident about in real
world can't be shaken." But Descartes said, "There's one thing you can't doubt. You can't doubt your
own consciousness. You can't doubt your own existence."

The famous line is, "I think, therefore I am." And spelling out this intuition, building from the fact you
could doubt that you have a body, but you can't doubt that you have a mind. Descartes wrote, "I knew
that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there
is no need of any place, nor does it dependent in a material thing... that is to say, the soul by which I am
what I am, is entirely distinct from body." So, that's a philosophical case for dualism. But as I said,
dualism is also emerged out of common sense. Think about how you describe your body. You describe
your body's if you possess it. My arm, my heart, my body, my brain, as if it's something separate from
you that you have. Or consider your intuitions about personal identity. So, typically, as people age, their
consciousness follows their body.

So, I get 10 years older, my mind 10 years older, my brain is 10 years older, it all connects together, but
we easily accept at least infection that people can hop from one body to another. There are many
comedies that involve body switching, body swamps. There are movies that involve somebody going to
sleep one morning as one person and waking up as another. We understand they're fiction, they aren't
real. But they make sense to us. There's an intuitive rationale to this. We don't walk out of the theory
and say, "I am totally confused what happened there." Rather, at least with our naive conception of the
self, we accept that least of the possibility, that you can hop from one body to another. None of this is
limited to modern-day movies, the most famous short story of history by Franz Kafka begins with the
sentence, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in
his bed into a gigantic insect." Metamorphosis involves that transformation and along before that in
Ulysses the characters are transformed. Some of the characters are transformed by an evil witch into
pigs. It's non of you took to people and turn them into pigs rather it's much worse. They put them in the
body of pigs. As the passage goes, "They had the head and voice, and bristles, and body of swine; but
their minds remained unchanged as before. So they were penned there, weeping." Our conception that
bodies and cells are separate, allows us to accept idea you had many people inhabiting one body. This is
how many people think about multiple personality disorder, something we'll get to quite later on the
course. It's also at the root of a view that many people; both religious and non-religious hold, which is
the idea of demonic possession. Your body can be taken over by somebody else. Another manifestation
of dualism is you could believe in intelligent beings without bodies. If mind and body are separate it
raises the possibility you could have one without the other.

Plainly you got to have bodies without minds. That's what a corpse is. But the argument goes you could
also have minds without bodies. This is for instance what many people think about gods or angels.
Which are the immaterial beings that can think, that can observe, that can act, but they don't have
physical bodies in the same sense that we do. Finally, and maybe most important for people, the idea
that of dualism, the idea you are not your physical body, raises what must be for many and incredibly
appealing consequence, which is that you can survive the destruction of the body. In fact, if you ask
most people; religious and non-religious, what will happen after you body is destroyed? The answer is
not well, I'm dead then, that's it. It's the end of things. But rather the belief is that you can live on.
Maybe you'll end up in some spirit world, maybe you will ascend to heaven, if you're unlucky maybe will
descend to hell. Maybe you'll occupy some other body as an reincarnation. But the idea is that the
destruction of your body need not be the destruction of you because you are not your body.

All of these beliefs, the beliefs about personal identity, the beliefs about life after death, about the
existence of supernatural beings. About God. All rest at least to some extent, on a dualist perspective.
So, materialism, which says dualism is just playing wrong is an audacious view, and should be treated as
such. You shouldn't just shrug and write it down. You should grapple with it, you should worry about it.
You should either be grudgingly accepted or fight against it. So, why are modern-day psychologists and
neuroscientists so confident that dualism is mistaken? Well, there are a few problems with it. One is that
it simply doesn't help us explain certain things that need to be explained. Appealing to an immaterial
world to an immaterial soul seems to dock certain questions that really do deserve an answer. So,
throughout this course we'll ask questions like, how do we learn language? What do we find sexually
attractive? How does memory work? These are questions about ourselves, about our minds. To say,
"Oh, it all happens some immaterial realm", leaves us hopeless when it comes to answering them.

The second concern is that at the time, Descartes was correct, to infer from the limitations of material
things physical things, that we probably are not physical things. But by now we have a much better
understanding what physical things can do which makes it entirely possible for many of us that we are
set things. So, I'm thinking for instance of computers and robots. For Descartes, the idea that a physical
thing can do something as complicated as play a game of chess would seem ludicrous. But now of
course we know that physical things and if you're looking at a computer you are looking at such a
physical thing, can do exactly that. They can understand language, they could recognize objects, they
could store things in memory, they can make inferences, and so on.

Now, for some of these things, they don't do it anywhere near as well as people do. So, when we talk
about language development for instance we see that, a two-year-old child uses and understands
language better than any computer around. So, we need to bear that in mind. But still, it's no longer
nuts to say that physical thing can do all of the rich and psychologically diverse and psychologically
complicated things that people do. Which means that we have to take seriously the claim that we are in
fact such physical things. The final consideration is that there's tremendous evidence that the brain is in
fact the roots of mental life. So, put aside all that philosophical abstract, arguments, there's just tons of
direct evidence. To some extent that direct evidence has always been there. You don't have to be born
in the 20th or 21st century to appreciate that getting hit in the head could affect your consciousness and
your memory. To appreciate that diseases like syphilis can lead to disruption of the will and of
consciousness. Alzheimer's can rob you of your rationality.

That coffee and alcohol can inflame the passions. It just is so evident in everyday life that if physical
events that affect the brain can affect ourselves, suggesting that at the very least, our mental life is
intimately connected to the brain. Over recent years something else has happened, which is we've
developed technologies that allow us to look directly into the brain. Look at the brains activation, and
infer from patterns of the brain activation what people are thinking. So, very crudely, you can put
somebody into a scanner, an fMRI scanner, and you could tell whether or not are thinking about
language, or music, or sex. The technology is increasing. There is such a point that is not implausible that
for some of you by the time you're listening to this, we can put a sleeping person under fMRI scanner,
and know from neural patterns of neural firings, know what they're dreaming. All of this I think it is very
difficult to keep this in mind, and hold on to the view of dualism. I think materialism however
uncomfortable, however unpalatable is a view that the science forces us to adopt.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/analisis-costos-direccion-empresas/
exam/7FFsp/cuestionario-modulo-2/attempt

https://www.coursera.org/learn/analisis-costos-direccion-empresas/
exam/7FFsp/cuestionario-modulo-2/attempt