PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE
CAN THE BRAIN UNDERSTAND ITSELF?
How do we perceive the world? How do we make decisions? What determines our emotions, our memories, and our sense of self? These questions that once occupied Descartes and Hume now engage neuroscientists at Harvard and MIT, armed not with logical arguments but with MRI scanners and computational models.
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Over seven intensive days in Boston, we will analyse those questions using experimental psychology, neuroscientific research, and philosophical analysis. You will explore how scientists and psychologists design experiments to test hypotheses about mental processes, how they use technology to observe neural activity, and how they apply those insights to practical problems in medicine, education, and technology.
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This programme is designed for students who want to understand not merely what we know about the mind, but how we know it.
THINKING DIFFERENTLY
After a week in Boston, you will think differently about thinking itself. You will be more sceptical of claims that sound authoritative, more appreciative of what rigorous evidence actually requires, and more precise in distinguishing what we know from what we merely suspect.
HARVARD & MIT
​Our curriculum explores how we sense and interpret the world, how we remember and forget, how we make decisions under uncertainty, and how emotions shape behaviour.
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Morning lectures will be delivered by faculty from Harvard University and MIT. You will learn to distinguish well-designed experiments from flawed ones, to spot confounding variables that undermine conclusions, and to evaluate whether statistical evidence supports the claims researchers make. Our focus is on developing critical-thinking skills rather than memorising results.
WHY DOES PSYCHOLOGY MATTER?
Most educated people encounter psychological research daily: claims about what makes people happy, how memory works, whether meditation changes the brain, what predicts academic success. These claims shape educational policy, medical practice, and personal decisions. Yet most cannot distinguish rigorous science from plausible-sounding nonsense.
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This programme will enable you to evaluate psychological and neuroscientific research critically. You will develop capacity for scientific reasoning: formulating testable hypotheses, interpreting evidence correctly, and distinguishing correlation from causation.
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These critical faculties prove valuable far beyond any single discipline. The ability to evaluate scientific claims rigorously will serve you well both in your chosen field and in navigating a world saturated with research findings.
BOSTON
Boston and Cambridge together house more research universities per square mile than almost anywhere else in the world. Their institutions create an extraordinary concentration of intellectual activity.
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Harvard's Department of Psychology, and MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences department have both produced groundbreaking work in perception, memory, decision-making, and neural computation.
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Cambridge, where you will spend your week, sits across the Charles River from Boston. Beyond the lecture hall, you can walk the same streets where America's founders debated liberty, or explore the river paths on which contemporary scientists contemplate consciousness.
