Neurozoology 2nd Edition: Minds Networks & The Evolution of Cognition Across The Tree of Life

Runtime: 24 hr, 43 min

Lectures: 24

A nervous system is not magic. It is an expensive, leaky, energy-hungry solution to a problem some animal’s ancestors actually faced. Learn to read it that way and the animal kingdom stops looking like a ladder with us on the top rung.

Across 24 lectures & 24 hours in the 17th installment of Unteachable Courses, a comparative neuroethologist walks through the engineering. An octopus carries roughly 500 million neurons, two-thirds of them in the arms, and threads its esophagus through the hole in its doughnut-shaped brain. A jumping spider plans a detour to prey it can no longer see, on about 600,000 neurons. A slime mold with no neurons at all learns to ignore a repellent, forgets on schedule, and hands what it learned to another slime mold by fusing with it. A desert ant counts its own steps home, and walks straight past the nest if you put it on stilts.

The course is equally interested in what is not true. The three-second goldfish, the ten-to-one glia ratio, left-brain and right-brain personalities, the wood-wide web, oxytocin as the love molecule, the elephant that never forgets: each is audited against the evidence, the strongest skeptical reading gets its full hearing, and the questions the field has not settled are left honestly open.

Sixteen mechanism lectures alternate with eight species showcases, so cephalopods, corvids and parrots, great apes, elephants, cetaceans, fish, arthropods, and cats and dogs each arrive as the payoff to the principle that precedes them. Built on more than 1,200 primary sources.

No uplift, no hype, no talking down. The awe is never in the adjective; it is in the neuron count, the conduction delay, the photoreceptor stack. The mechanism is the marvel.