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Neuroscience Basics How the brain works at the level of cells, chemistry, and circuits, and which popular stories about it are wrong: dopamine as wanting, prediction error, the prefrontal cortex under stress, pain and placebo as brain outputs, realistic neuroplasticity, and the neuromyths and scan-reading errors to stop falling for.
41 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain · Lisa Feldman Barrett The best single starting point: short, current, and built around retiring the triune brain and the fear-centre story in favour of a predicting, body-budgeting brain. 02 Book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst · Robert Sapolsky The long one, and worth it: a behaviour traced back through seconds, hours, years, and evolution, with the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, dopamine, and stress each given a careful chapter. 03 Book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness · Anil Seth Perception as controlled hallucination and emotion as interoceptive prediction, from the researcher who made the phrases current. The middle chapters are the ones for this deck. 04 Book Explain Pain · David Butler and Lorimer Moseley Pain as a protective output of the brain, explained for patients and clinicians together. The practical companion to the pain cards and the most useful book here for anyone living with persistent pain. 05 Book The Idea of the Brain: A History · Matthew Cobb How every era has described the brain in terms of its latest machine, from hydraulics to telegraphs to computers. The best vaccine against taking the current metaphors, including prediction, too literally. 06 Book The Brain That Changes Itself · Norman Doidge The book that made neuroplasticity a household word, told through cases. Read it for the stories and the history; its claims about how far adult change can go run ahead of the evidence, and the taxi-driver card has the caveats it skips. 07 Book Dopamine Nation · Anna Lembke A clinician's account of addiction and the pleasure-pain balance, readable and humane. It simplifies the dopamine story (the wanting-versus-liking split is largely missing), so pair it with the Berridge paper on that card. 