Brain and Behavior

This course grounds psychology in biology: the idea that perception, emotion, memory, language, and disorders like schizophrenia or anxiety are not abstract phenomena but products of neurons, circuits, and neurochemistry you can actually point to on a brain. Alongside Carlson's textbook chapters, you'll work through a brain atlas in weekly lab assignments, run small-group exercises, and lead discussions on primary research papers covering systems like vision, emotion, and learning. As a sophomore-year requirement, it gives you the neural vocabulary that later courses on cognition, clinical psychology, and neuroscience electives will assume you already speak.