Stanford University.

By now, I am not Dr. Sapolsky, you probably got some cues from the uh, the beard and other things. My name is Nathan. I'm a graduate student. I'm a fourth year PhD student in the neuroscience program, and I'm gonna be giving you the introductory lecture today on basically how the brain works and just to get a sense of who is here before I get started, how many of you are either biology major or home bio majors and decide to come today?

That's a lot of people. Okay. How many in other hard sciences or engineering? Few. Okay. How many in the social sciences? Few. And humanities. All right. Humanities. Anybody else in anything other? Okay. We've got a few others as well. Okay, great. So for some of you, this is going to be a review and hopefully you'll still learn something new.

For some of you, this is going to be the first time that you're hearing these terms, and hopefully this will give you just a very general background so that when you hear Dr. Sapolsky give lectures on neuroscience later you have a better understanding of what he's talking about. So we started out this whole course talking about the everlasting question of why did the chicken cross the road?

Yes, that's supposed to be a chicken. My major is not art, but the chicken is crossing the road. And we started the course basically saying that this whole course is going to teach us why the chicken crossed the road. And specifically the first half of this course is talking about the ways that different sciences have approached this question.

So we started out with evolution, which would ask. How did this behavior of crossing the road evolve over many, many, many millions of years? Why was it adaptive? Why did chickens who cross the road produce more offspring? All of that? It was studied by old men going around in boats to the Gala Galapagos to see how chickens on different islands cross the road and then figured out how that happened over millions of years.

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