In the 1950s, a Connecticut man named Henry Molaison became an unfortunate but invaluable source of information about how learning is implemented in the human brain after an experimental brain surgery led to profound amnesia. Studies of how he could (and couldn't) learn - and what those studies uncover about how the rest of us learn - are detailed in this revealing lecture.

If you think "getting a good night's rest" is the only way that sleep affects learning, think again. Our brain is often just as active during sleep as it is while we're awake, and what happens at a neural level during sleep has a profound impact on what we remember, and what we forget. Different stages of sleep influence different kinds of learning and memory, and that's just the beginning.

To wrap up the course's section on conscious, explicit learning, Professor Polk delivers an enticing "myth-busting" talk about controversial topics in the field. Do people repress traumatic memories and can such repressed memories later re-emerge? Professor Polk cuts through the hype and lays out the actual scientific findings related to each of these controversies.

Diving back into the brain itself, this lecture explores the neuroscience behind working memory in much the same way earlier lectures examined explicit memory and implicit memory. Are different parts of the brain responsible for storing visual information versus verbal information in working memory? Prepare for an illuminating ride.

Set your highlighters and pens down and stop re-reading your material! These are actually two of the least-effective study techniques. Professor Polk explains why these old techniques don't really work and offers four different and more efficient, approaches to studying, which have been scientifically demonstrated to work more effectively.

Explore the brain's mechanisms for learning from reinforcement. You'll start with the psychological aspects, discovering the way humans learn by a series of trials and rewards. Then you'll find out what parts of the brain process pleasure, self-control, and craving, and see how the psychology and neuroscience of reward processing converge.

Here's another fascinating surprise: Aging does not inevitably lead to learning and memory problems. In fact, there are substantial differences in how aging affects different cognitive functions and in how it affects different people. Fortunately, Professor Polk demonstrates several proven - and enjoyable - methods of maintaining and even improving our brains as we get older.

Several common learning disabilities are defined and explored. Learn about dyslexia, the most common learning disability, including its symptoms, the neural mechanisms that underlie it, and how difficulty in recognizing and manipulating phonemes - the set of basic sounds that get combined to form words - plays a large role.

Turn again to the neural components of learning to better understand how unconscious, implicit learning occurs in your brain. You actually have more connections between the neurons in your brain than there are stars in our galaxy. Explore how your brain does so, how it learns to predict rewards, and the role that dopamine plays in the learning process.

Learning a new language is labor-intensive and complicated, so how do toddlers do it so easily? This lecture details how our brains progress from single-word associations to forming full, original sentences, as well as how babies learn to overcome obstacles like learning irregular past-tense verb forms (look/looked versus run/ran, for example).