Our Master’s course is research focused and aims to provide students with the technical and intellectual skills needed to understand modern brain science. These skills can prepare them for further work in brain science but are also easily transferable to any context that requires critical thinking, familiarity with data science, or the effective communication of ideas.

Over the two-year course, students complete a selection of courses from two streams: methodological and conceptual. This coursework is concentrated in the first year, with students primarily working on their individual research project in the second year.
Students further develop their research knowledge and experience through a series of lab rotations, the Institute seminar, and through weekly research exchanges. At the seminar, experts from around the world are invited to give a talk and students are prepared to present their own ideas too. At the research exchange, students and faculty discuss current research ideas and new experimental results.

We believe that students learn best in a friendly and supportive environment where students can be responsible for their own work. We have the opportunity to welcome people from all over the world and with a wide range of academic backgrounds, helping us build a diverse social and intellectual environment.

•教育目標
一、整合哲學、生理學與心理學,培養具備跨領域心智意識研究動機之青年才俊
二、培育具備尖端神經影像專精研究技術之心智意識科學研究人才
三、透過臨床實務經驗,引導學員關懷大眾健康議題,並將所學貢獻於社會國家

Total credits for Graduation: 34 including 22 required and 12 elective credits. Students can take up to 6 elective credits from other institutes or programs where approved by their advisor.

For more than two decades, the problem of consciousness has been one of the most important research topics in Neuroscience. The goal has been to explain how subjective conscious experiences arise from the physical brain. Toward this end, diverse theories and models have been proposed. In this course, we will review and discuss prominent theories and models explaining potential neural mechanisms of consciousness. This course targets two groups of students. First, for students who are interested in consciousness, this course will provide the opportunity to learn and discuss the most prominent theories of consciousness. These students will then have ample background knowledge for developing their own research ideas and designing their own experiments. Second, for students who are interested in other cognitive or affective processes, this course will show how investigations of important neuroscientific questions can follow from comprehensive, coherent theorizing. Most importantly, throughout the course, we strongly encourage students to develop their own views on the neural correlates of or neural predispostions for consciousness.
Developing an understanding of the brain requires knowledge from across different research areas. In this course we combine the expertise of different tutors to provide students with a overview of key areas of brain science. This ranges from how brains have evolved to how we can measure the activity of a single neuron.
This lecture provides an overview of this highly interdisciplinary domain of visual cognition, ranging from experimental psychology to neurosciences and computer sciences. We look at various approaches on object recognition and how these processes differ from face recognition. We study neural implementations in the brain, how areas form networks of visual processing and we examine computational/artificial implementations.
We introduce biology and mathematics of cellular neuroscience. The primary goal is to recapitulate underlying cell biological concepts and introduce quantitative techniques to describe dynamics of neurons. We discuss electrophysiology, intracellular calcium dynamics, and gene expression and showcase essential mathematical techniques.
The purposes of this course are establishing fundamental abilities on understanding, analyzing and practical experience in ERP/EEG experiments. After taking this course, students will be able to build independent and critical thinking to evaluate and execute neuroelectrophysiology experiments.
An understanding of the fundamental functional processes in the brain is essential for interpreting neuroscientific or psychological results and for developing new knowledge in these fields. This course will acquaint the student with the basic energy needs of the brain and the mechanisms in place to support these needs. It will outline the means of communication between neurons, neurotransmission and neuromodulation, and explain the higher-level functions of these different systems. Finally, students will be familiarised with the disease conditions related to neurotransmission dysfunction.
Statistics is the science whereby inferences are made about specific random phenomena on the basis of relatively limited sample material. Nowadays it becomes a fundamental ability in graduate school to apply statistical methods to medical and biological problems in the real world. The goal of this course is to present biostatistics techniques at an introductory level so that graduate students can become familiar with them and possess the ability to apply statistical approaches to specific problem-based research projects. R software will be used for demonstration and practices. It requires no previous background in statistics, and its mathematical level assumes only a knowledge of algebra.
This course provides a comprehensive description of psychopathology and current data on neurobiology in psychomotor alterations, affective alterations, thought alterations, delusions and hallucinations. Then, potential models linking brain (dys)functioning and psychopathology are discussed. Finally, the course ends with the critical reading of papers on psychiatric neuroscience regarding the covered topics.
This course is composed of three units: ①functionality of brain regions, ②fMRI analysis procedure and ③neurophysiological basis behind brain activity. During the class the students will learn the basic concept through lectures and practice their analysis ability with real fMRI data. Students will be requested to attend one analysis workshop and submit one conclusive abstract to international conference by the end of this course.
Research methods and experimental design is the core of scientific method. The merits of this course are establishing fundamental abilities on understanding, analyzing and recognizing the limitations/customs experimental designs specific to various research methods. After taking this course, students will be able to build independent and critical thinking to evaluate experimental designs as well as design experiments meeting scientific standards. This course is composed of three parts: lecture, discussion and practice. Students will learn principles and theories through lectures. The top-half of this course focuses on learning theories. The bottom-half of this course emphasizes on establishing critical thinking through discussion and applying principles and theories via individual presentations and report.
The objective is to expand student view of latest neuroscience research in various subfields, and to develop critical thining and scientific discussion skills. Second-year students will also learn while giving their own presentations.