Introduction to Neuroscience in Social Work Practice

Catalog description

This course is a one-credit course and provides an introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience principles useful in social work practice. The goal of the course is to explain the biological basis of human behavior in the social environment. Students will learn to recognize mechanisms of perception and cognitive processes and will learn to identify pathways of signal processing, from the body of a single neuron to specialized neuronal structures of the brain. Class discussion will focus on how events of the physical world may affect an individual's behavior, as an individual and as a member of the community. Information gained in this course will help students to understand the complexity of the human adult nervous system in health and disability including trauma and addiction as well as the role of neural processing in cognitive interventions.