Link to Physio Psyc Course Blog

The content of this course is centered on the basic biological correlates of behavioral and psychological processes. “Behavior” is a broad and encompassing concept that subsumes phenomena ranging from biochemical processes to emergent phenomena such as emotion and cognition.  This course presents content with great potential to answer the burning questions about ourselves, our limitations, and our capacities. Physiological Psychology is a discipline that morphs psychology from a social science to a life science.

This course can be useful to students in many ways. It can provide insight into the basic functions of those who they interact with on a daily basis, provide a greater understanding for the bases of health and disease, and provide a foundation for future areas of study or research in their own career paths. This course educates students on how the body and the brain interact to produce the “mind” and behavior in general. The information is often organized and presented in a “systems” perspective to demonstrate the dynamic and mutually interactive processes of the body and the brain. This class should help deconstruct ideas that separate the body and the brain to aid in understanding them as one interactive system.

The course is roughly organized into three sections. The first section introduces the foundations of neurobiology in terms of structure, function, and guiding principles. The second section builds upon a “systems” perspective of neurobiological functioning and then introduces the basics of sensory perception.  The third section largely extrapolates neurobiological functioning to explain emergent psychological processes and disorders.