1.1: Interaction of Heredity and Environment

This unit lays the foundation for the entire course. Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, and every psychological phenomenon studied throughout the course has a biological basis. You'll cover how heredity and environment interact to shape who we are, how the nervous system carries information through the body, how neurons fire and communicate, how the brain produces every mental experience you'll ever have, how the sleep/wake cycle structures consciousness, and how the senses transduce the outside world into the neural signals the brain can read. Unit 1 is the conceptual base everything else builds on.