This is a team-taught introductory course, part of the core curriculum at UoC. Most of the lectures deal with classical psychology, so in my segment I try to emphasize that cognition actually has a physiological basis. In particular I cover the basics of neural network theory and explain how memories are formed, stored and recalled in distributed neural circuits. For those unfamiliar with neural networks, the way memory systems work is surprising and fascinating. This is a handout I wrote to cover the main ideas.

I also emphasize that the behavior of large neural nets (e.g. the brain) is extremely complex and probably  beyond anything we can intuit. This is why mathematics is so important in neuroscience--because it provides a way of reasoning even when things don't make sense. I give the example that a googleplex--a very large number--takes about 14 hours to print out on paper. Multiplying this number by 100 billion and printing again, it takes about 1/100th of a second longer to print. Most people's intuition wouldn't predict this. With this in mind, even the highest "mental" functions, like emotion and reasoning, need not be seen as inexplicable, but rather the product of neural mechanisms too complex for us to intuit.