Summer 2025

Experience in the Eye of the Beholder: How Individual Brains Create Reality

Course Description

This course explores the fascinating world of individual consciousness and subjective experience, examining how each person’s unique mental landscape emerges from brain activity. We’ll explore cutting-edge methods scientists use to study the individual brain—from neuroimaging techniques that reveal personal thought patterns to innovative approaches for measuring subjective states like emotions, memories, and perceptions.

The course addresses fundamental questions: How do we study something as personal as individual experience? What makes each mind unique? How do subjective feelings translate into observable brain activity?

Through case studies and current research, we’ll examine both the remarkable tools available for understanding individual minds and the profound challenges that remain in bridging the gap between objective brain science and subjective human experience.

Registration Link

Course Goals

I’ve taught many Osher courses on the brain—ranging from its broad architecture to how it changes over the lifespan. But this course is especially close to my heart, especially because it might be my last. It’s my first that directly connects to my own research on how people understand the world differently from one another, how those differences are reflected in the brain, and what it means to take subjectivity seriously in a scientific framework.

In neuroscience, we often search for general rules—how attention works “on average,” how memory is supported “in general.” But what happens when we zoom in on individual minds? This course grew from that question. We’ll explore what makes each person’s brain unique and how scientists are beginning to study not just what people are thinking, but how they experience it.

This is not a lecture-heavy course. I hope it feels more like a shared inquiry. We’ll reflect on questions like: Can brain activity reveal what it feels like to be someone else? What does it mean to have a “unique” mental life? And how do we make sense of the tension between objective data and subjective experience?

Through open discussion, hands-on demonstrations, and insights from new research (some of it my own!), we’ll tackle these questions together. And as always, I’ll adapt the online guide based on what resonates in class—so that it remains useful even after the course ends.

Note: I developed this course in summer 2025, incorporating research that came out in the last couple years.