 This is an artistic representation of a human brain, one of the most complex structures in the universe. We use it all the time to interact with the world, to think and to survive. Neuroscientists have been trying for decades to understand the brain as precisely as possible in order to cure diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and depression for instance. But we are still far from this because it's just too complicated. So what we want to do in this class is to use a different approach which is based on the idea, on the old idea, that the best way to test if we understand something is to build it. So we will use concepts from complexity science, from artificial intelligence, from philosophy of mind and from neuroscience of course, to try to determine the minimal mechanisms that make a brain work and implement them. We may not succeed but it will be fun.