What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
Why describing isn't living
Orientation — the explanatory gap, Nagel's bat, and why this course is a practicum instead of a reading list
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Consciousness that isn't solo
What laughter's contagiousness says about experiences that only exist between people, not inside one
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
The same signal, two meanings
Closing unit 1 — how identical bodily sensations can carry opposite meanings depending on what produced them
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
What the mind does with nothing to do
Opening unit 2 — the default mode network, mind-wandering, and boredom as a state with its own structure
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The threshold with no witness
Why falling asleep is the hardest state in the course to study, and what hypnagogia tells us anyway
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Answers that arrive before the reasoning
Closing unit 2 — the incubation effect, and why insight so reliably shows up mid-shower rather than mid-effort
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
The shortest road to memory
Opening unit 3 — why smell reaches memory faster and more involuntarily than any other sense
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
When silence is a shared state
What comfortable silence tells us about consciousness that depends on another mind being present
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
The body knows before the thought does
Closing unit 3 — the somatic marker hypothesis, and why relief so often feels physical before it feels like a conclusion
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
The self against a much larger scale
Opening unit 4 — the psychology of awe, "small self" effects, and why a known fact can suddenly become a felt one
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
The gravity of an absence
Why grief resists the neat-stages model, and why this course studies its shape rather than asking anyone to manufacture it
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
What the semester doesn't resolve
The closing lecture — surveying the semester's twelve inductions and declining to hand over a tidy theory of consciousness at the end
Week 12 · 10 May 2027