Minds are Weird

Monday June 3 – Friday June 7
Live sessions: $250
Recordings: $150
(See session times below)

We really are quite different from each other — why?

In this week-long course, we’ll survey the wondrous world of neurodiversity. We’ll begin with ADHD, move to the autism spectrum, and then deal with depression, and with phobias/anxiety. How do these work in the brain? How do they work in our lives, and react with our cultures? Why might they have evolved in the first place? Finally, we’ll ask whether we’re really living in a mental health crisis for adolescents, and if so, why.

A note: open discussion of some of topics like depression can be disturbing to some students; we advise you to consider whether this course is right for your kid. Because these topics touch on, well, us, we’re being extra careful in our presentation of these subjects. Throughout all of this, we’ll be building an understanding of the many different ways to be human.

Note: we first taught this course a couple years ago. Why are we doing it again? Since we first taught it, new evidence has come to light, and the conversation has evolved — especially with Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. We’re looking carefully at the arguments both sides have brought forward, and will help you think through it.

Sessions

This course is given as a live, week-long seminar — small, hyper-interactive, cameras-on lessons for kids 8 to 15. (That’s why they’re more expensive than the webinars.) They’re 90 minutes long. You can choose between two sessions:

Mornings: 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific
Afternoons: 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific

They’re $250 for the whole week. You can also choose the recordings, which are only $150, and which you can keep to watch whenever you’d like.