After providing all the funding for The Brain from Top to Bottom for over 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction informed us that because of budget cuts, they were going to be forced to stop sponsoring us as of March 31st, 2013.

We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work. But we have not managed to find the funding we need. We must therefore ask our readers for donations so that we can continue updating and adding new content to The Brain from Top to Bottom web site and blog.

Please, rest assured that we are doing our utmost to continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no adverstising.

Whether your support is moral, financial, or both, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet, and Al Daigen




Thursday, 20 October 2016
Psychologist Scans Own Brain Twice per Week for a Year and a Half

If you use social media, you have probably seen posts where someone has shown photos of themselves taken at regular intervals over a long period. Well, Stanford University psychologist Russell Poldrack has gone them one better: he has scanned his own brain twice per week for a year and a half! But Poldrack’s goal isn’t simply to wow his friends on Facebook. He is using the scans to do something that has never been attempted before: to understand how the connectivity of a normal person’s brain may vary over a period of several months, a span of time in which people with mental disorders often show considerable fluctuations in their psychological functions.

Poldrack calls his study “MyConnnectome”, and he published his initial results in the December 9, 2015 edition of the journal Nature Communications. It might seem surprising that no one had ever gathered such data before. But not many normal subjects would have been willing to do what Poldrack did: get into an MRI machine for a brain scan two mornings each week (one of them on an empty stomach) for a year and a half, have blood samples taken once per week, and write a report on his diet and physical activity every day. It took a scientist who was really motivated to advance the state of knowledge. (more…)

From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed