This course is an introduction to the psychology and neuroscience of music. We will study the psychological and brain processes that underlie the perception and production of music, current theories about why and how music evokes emotion, and the evolutionary and developmental roots of the variation and commonalities of music across cultures and traditions. Students will be required to complete a series of short assignments and a final paper or project.

This course offers a critical appraisal of the concepts of time, history, and memory in the social and cognitive sciences. We will start by defining our field of research at the intersection of sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience. We will examine the emergence of memory as an object of study within these disciplines, and focus on the interplay of individual and collected/collective memory.

Every society offers public rituals, formal instruction and places of sacred memory whose purpose is to foster a common political identity like nationalism. Some of these devices appear natural and timeless; others are obviously invented. Some exist in peaceful periods; others are meant to galvanize people for warfare.

Language is paramount among the capacities that characterize humans. We hold language as a marker of our humanity, and by understanding language we assume that we will understand something important about ourselves. In this course we will ask, and try to answer questions such as the following: What's so special about language? How do we produce sentences? How do we understand them? What might cause us to fail at either task? What is meaning, and how does language express it? Is our capacity for language a biological endowment unique to the human species?

Words are the basic linguistics units of a language and the ability to recognize a word is a fundamental component of reading. For many years most of the research in reading was conducted in English, and it was assumed that what was true for reading English words would also be true for words in other languages. However, many languages differ in striking ways from English and studying these languages can be useful in illustrating the different ways that people approach reading.

Students in this course will become members of research teams focusing on projects designated by the instructor. Projects will involve open research questions in artificial intelligence, artificial life, or computational models of cognitive systems. They will be oriented toward the production of publishable results and/or distributable software systems. Students will gain skills that will be useful for Division III project work and graduate-level research. Prerequisite: one programming course (any language)

One definition of "research" is that it is a systematic investigation to solve new or existing problems or to develop new ideas. In this research course, we will have learning at Hampshire as the subject of our research, developing explanations about what excites students and faculty about the pedagogy and educational structure at Hampshire College and what leads to strong student learning. We will use a variety of research methods - from interview to observation, survey to content analysis (as appropriate to our questions) to understand teaching and learning here.

This seminar approaches mainstream American journalism as an example of cultural modernism, an idea that was first proposed 20 years ago as a partial explanation for its rise during the Cold War period and its steady decline since then. But the insight has gone mostly undeveloped. In this course, we will explore mainstream journalism's style (impersonal, reproducible), its commitment to objectivity (a scientific way of knowing the world), its avoidance of vernacular discourse (preferring an artificial, official voice), newspaper layout and other design (spare, the use of white space), etc.

The modern world is shaped and deeply influenced by modern science and technology. While Muslim societies made valuable contributions to natural philosophy in medieval times, the relation to modern science is more complicated. In this course we will look at the reaction of Muslim intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries to the advent of modernity and how it shaped their views regarding modern science. The second half of the class will look at contemporary debates over "Islamic Science," the trend of finding modern science in the Qur'an, and biological evolution.

This course is an upper-level research seminar designed for students who wish to learn electrophysiological techniques and how to apply those techniques to answer research questions in the domain of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology. Students will help design a study of attention, run participants, and analyze the data. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to develop an original research project from conception through piloting participants.