Neuroscience avout: video

Here I'm posting my collection of links that may be useful for teaching introductory neuroscience at a freshman level. I collected them last year, when preparing for my summer course, and while this year I'll try to update it, the core is likely to remain the same.

One major change in my attitude this year is that I grew somewhat tired of TED talks, as I've simply lost trust in them. TED is just not peer-reviewed enough, which is quite of a problem for science topics. In a popular science talk a presenter has to oversimplify the facts, and also to explain them in some way, even if scientifically speaking these "explanations" are still at a stage of being highly speculative theories. And the audience will never know that. The situation is kind of awkward, because both the simplification, and the "explanation" are required part of the packaging that make the talk popular, and the information - digestible. They have to be present in a good talk, because you have to explain to people why your research is important, and what all this stuff could actually mean. The problem however is that the world of science is so vast and specialized that even scientists themselves often have a hard time distinguishing a mainstream scientific star from a passionate but weird marginal, unless the talk hits on the listener's immediate field of research.

But still I'll provide at least some links to the TED talks, because I want my student to improve their presentation skills, and TED talks I've selected are rather good in this regard.

So:

Free neuroscience textbooks:

Free "Brain Facts" book from the Society for Neuroscience. - very introductory and brief, but still nice. It may be used as a "primer" for high-school kids, or in a very brief course in which neuroscience is just a part of a syllabus.
Free web-based textbook on Neuroscience from U. Texas medical School - This book is more advanced, and generally approaches the Neuro1 level. Some parts are actually simpler than I would prefer them to be, while some sections are slightly overloaded with details, but overall it's pretty nice. And for a free book it is just unbelivably great! Also it has some nice flash-based interactive illustrations for every topic.
Another free textbook.

My favorite series of lectures by Robert Sapolsky (playlist of 25 hour-long videos):