Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
Free Brainy Lectures for Everyone!
Thanks to the goofy interests of our usual attendants (and not, though the allegation would be fair, due to the name of the event), subject matter at Evenings for Brains tends regularly towards neuroscience and psychology in general. As a result, I was acquainted with V. S. Ramachandran’s TED Talk, and was subsequently chuffed all over to learn that he had produced an extended version of his presentation in the form of a five-part lecture series for the BBC.
The Reith Lectures are named for John Reith, the inaugural controller-general of the BBC, and exemplify the corporation’s now (tragically) quaint and paternal-sounding charter to “inform, educate, and entertain.” They resemble our Massey Lectures (or rather, the other way around), and might be positioned as TED Talks for folks with long attention spans.
When I first stumbled on the Reith lectures a few years ago, I asked around with various British radio buffs whether any attempt had been made by the filesharing and archival communities to collect and release the series online, as I’ve seen done with the Goon Show. I was told that it was a good idea, and that some of the more famous or recent lectures were in “circulation,” but that the body was vast and there was more missing than was accessible. Particularly with old BBC archival material, this had a ring of doom about it: in the company’s (later, corporation’s) early history, it was notoriously in the habit of recording new programs over old reels. I found my Ramachandran lectures, which were recent, and a single fragment of Bertrand Russell’s series, which was famous, and consigned the rest to a teary oblivion shared by the early seasons of the Goons, the pilot of Clue (until recently!), and some Doctor Who episodes which I wasn’t particularly broken up over.
It was enough of a jolt of good news to get me blogging again, therefore, when I learned from the ever-fecund Open Culture website that the BBC had made the entire series available for free as an international podcast!
Please, please try some of this stuff. There are names in the list of lecturers you’re bound to know, or topics you already care about. If you’re nuts like me, listen from beginning to end and witness the evolution of western social conventions and intellectual fashions—Uncle Bert often makes my heart sing, but his positivism is shocking and foreign, even to my idealistic, naïve self. If nothing else, try the first Ramachandran lecture (or the TED, linked above), and see if you don’t want more. I so wish the CBC was cool enough to do this with the Masseys; they sell the lectures on CD instead (at the time of writing, anyway—maybe they could maybe be shamed into opening up a bit by the Venerable Beeb). As it stands, the Massey lectures are a bit more populous in the wild than the Reiths were, so folks with the right inclinations and skills will do what they will.
One other thing I’d like to tell you about, O Absent Readership, is another swell bit of totally legal, openly accessible brainy goodness served up by Stanford University and brought to my attention again by Open Culture. Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist, famous for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, has been featured by TED, The Teaching Company, and Big Ideas, and has recently had his open course on Human Behavioural Biology broadcast to the world, OCW-style.
Sapolsky’s name was familiar from the Teaching Company catalogue, but I hadn’t seen him teach until I watched the clip featured on Open Culture. Their pitch is my pitch: try a few minutes of the first lecture—if you’re hooked, the whole course is available to you. (The ability, from home, for free, to see a professor teach and to say, “gosh, I wish I was in his class,” and then to be able to watch ALL the lectures in that class, is like paradise. It’s transmission-based learning, but it’s still so, so tasty.)
What’s most valuable about this series, for me, is that Sapolsky provides a fairly thorough overview of the various lenses for viewing human behaviour scientifically, but is ever at pains (or, takes sadistic pleasure) to tear down the confident edifices of various modes of thought. He uses the metaphor of being trapped within one of many “buckets” when trying to explain human behaviour: evolutionists, molecular geneticists, and ethologist care about different things and countenance different kinds of evidence when explaining phenomena they would all equally recognize. Exploring the conflict between the different buckets, as Sapolsky does here, breaks down the apparent monolith of scientific accord and offers a more accurate picture of this particular way of understanding the world. For this I have great affection.
My approach to the lectures has been to download them from YouTube using FlashGot (free!), rip the audio data from them with AOA Audio Extractor (free!), and then listen to them on my iPod while commuting (fun!). For the buckets with which I’m familiar, this has worked pretty well, and I try to watch the lectures covering stranger topics, like neurology. It’s been awfully rewarding and compelling for me; I hope some of you find this useful, too.
