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Psychology & Behavioral Science

What is a human being, biologically? From Sapolsky's baboons to Kandel's sea slugs, this course explains behavior by zooming out from seconds (neurotransmitters) to millennia (evolution). You are your biology. Your biology is not your destiny. Hold both at once.

15 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

One Second Before: How the Brain Makes You Do What You Do

This unit opens with one of the most disturbing case studies in the history of neuroscience — the 1966 University of Texas shooting — to introduce Sapolsky's timescale framework for understanding human behavior. From the amygdala firing one second before an action to the evolutionary pressures that shaped our brains over millennia, students learn that understanding behavior requires zooming out through every timescale simultaneously.

The Sea Slug That Changed Everything: Eric Kandel and the Biology of Memory

Eric Kandel fled Vienna at age 9 as the Nazis arrived. Sixty years later, he won the Nobel Prize for discovering how memories are physically stored in the brain — using a sea slug. This unit traces Kandel's biography and his scientific breakthrough: that learning changes the physical structure of synaptic connections, and that the machinery is ancient, preserved across species from slugs to humans.

Your Brain on Stress: Baboons, Cortisol, and the Biology of Social Pain

Robert Sapolsky spent 30 years darting baboons in Kenya to measure their stress hormones. What he found overturned a simple story about rank and health: it is not being at the bottom that kills you, but the unpredictability and lack of control that kills you. This unit connects baboon field biology to human stress physiology, the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants, and a remarkable natural experiment — a tuberculosis outbreak that changed one troop's culture for a generation.

Plasticity: The Brain That Changes Itself

London taxi drivers have measurably larger hippocampi than bus drivers. Blind Braille readers recruit their visual cortex to process touch. And every time you access a memory, you are literally rewriting it — a finding so disturbing for the justice system that courts are still grappling with its implications. This unit explores neuroplasticity: the brain's lifelong capacity to reshape itself in response to experience, for better and for worse.

The Teenage Brain Is Not Broken: Adolescence, Risk, and the Unfinished Cortex

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature — not until about age 25. This is not a defect but a design feature, and the question of whether we treat it as deficit or adaptation shapes everything from how we run classrooms to how we set sentences in juvenile court. This unit examines the neuroscience of adolescent brain development, the evolutionary logic of risk-taking, and the landmark Supreme Court cases that used neuroscience to argue that teens are constitutionally different.

The Geography of Rationality

Herbert Simon coined 'bounded rationality' in 1955. Kahneman and Tversky spent the next four decades cataloging exactly how bounded. Sapolsky adds the layer they missed: your 'rational' decisions are downstream of hormones, blood sugar, sleep debt, and childhood adversity. This unit examines the biology of judgment — and what it means for every institution that assumes humans make coherent choices.

Heuristics: The Shortcuts That Built Civilization

Your brain uses roughly 20 watts of power. A comparably capable computer would need a nuclear power plant. Heuristics — availability, representativeness, anchoring, affect — are not bugs. They're compression algorithms that let 20 watts simulate extraordinary computational power, most of the time. This unit examines the two warring schools of thought about human shortcuts, and what the debate reveals about rationality, environment, and the difference between a mistake and an adaptation.

The Marshmallow Test Was Wrong

Walter Mischel's 1972 marshmallow test became the most famous experiment in developmental psychology: kids who waited got better SAT scores, better jobs, better lives. The lesson was clear — willpower is destiny. Then a 2018 replication nearly erased the effect. The real predictor was household income. This unit examines what the marshmallow test actually measured, why the willpower narrative is so sticky, and what poverty genuinely does to decision-making.

Why You Can't Tickle Yourself

Try to tickle yourself. You can't — your brain predicted the touch and cancelled the sensation. This is prediction error: the brain generates constant predictions about what will happen next, and only updates when reality doesn't match. This unit traces that insight from self-tickling to dopamine neuroscience to the architecture of addiction — and explains why every slot machine and social media notification is an engineered violation of exactly this system.

Kandel's Rats and Your Study Habits

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for discovering the molecular basis of memory in a sea slug. What he found in Aplysia californica — that memory is the physical strengthening of synaptic connections through repeated activation — turns out to have direct implications for how humans should study. The evidence is now overwhelming: students are doing almost everything wrong. This unit explains what Kandel's synapses have to do with your flashcard stack.

Obedience: The Experiment That Haunts Psychology

An unflinching examination of Milgram's obedience experiments, Asch's conformity studies, and the Stanford Prison Experiment — and what they reveal about the human capacity to harm others under institutional pressure.

The Tribe: In-Groups, Out-Groups, and the Biology of Us vs. Them

The neuroscience and social psychology of in-group favoritism and out-group hostility — from the 50-millisecond amygdala response to Sherif's Robbers Cave boys to Jane Elliott's blue-eyed classroom. Bias is real, biological, and partially malleable.

Adolescence Is Not a Disease

Adolescence through an evolutionary and neurobiological lens — why the brain deliberately increases risk-taking and peer orientation during this period, how Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky map onto the neuroscience, and why 'storm and stress' is a half-truth.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Sapolsky's foundational work on stress physiology — why the stress response evolved for short-term emergencies and why deploying it chronically destroys the body. The Whitehall Study, ACEs research, and epigenetic transmission of trauma.

The Replication Crisis: When Psychology Broke Itself

The 2015 Open Science Collaboration found only 36% of published psychology findings could be replicated. What failed, why it failed, and how psychology rebuilt its methodology — a story about science catching its own mistakes.

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.