Monday, 9 December 2013
Links About Our Evolutionary Inheritance
This week, as we have before in this blog, we are posting a set of links to pages on other web sites that discuss a subject covered in The Brain from Top to Bottom, along with brief descriptions of the content of those pages.
The subject this week is the sub-topic “Our Evolutionary Inheritance”, under the topic “Evolution and the Brain”—an important topic indeed, for as the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” And when it comes to neurobiology, that assertion is especially apt. (more…)
Evolution and the Brain | Comments Closed
Monday, 25 November 2013
Rhythms, Pain and Consciousness in Invertebrates
This week we’d like to offer you a sort of “seafood cocktail”: links to discussions of three fundamental questions of neurobiology, as investigated using three different kinds of marine invertebrates: lobsters, crabs, and Aplysia (sea slugs).
The first link below is to an article that discusses the many rhythmic activities that can be observed in nervous systems, and in particular in that of the lobster. (more…)
Pleasure and Pain, The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
Friday, 15 November 2013
Language as a Window into Human Nature
In previous posts in this blog, we have drawn your attention to various lectures in the RSA Animate series, in which experts is a variety of fields give online talks while cartoon illustrations are drawn in sped-up fashion to accompany their voice-over. This week we’d like to tell you about another RSA Animate lecture. This one is about language, and it is given by Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. (more…)
From Thought to Language | Comments Closed
Monday, 28 October 2013
Christof Koch, a Romantic Reductionist
Just in case the 2012 Summer School on the Evolution and Function of Consciousness in Montreal did not quench your ravenous thirst for knowledge on the subject, I am providing a link below to a recent Brain Science Podcast interview with Christof Koch, another great name in consciousness research.
Author of the book Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch argues that we are no longer confined to philosphical speculation about human consciousness, but instead can now make predictions and test them experimentally. (more…)
The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
Monday, 14 October 2013
Axons Play Unexpected Role in Processing Information
Recently, someone asked me whether it would be fair to say that the integration of all the information that one neuron receives from other neurons takes place in its dendrites. I replied that according to the classic model of neural communication, that is certainly the case, but that processes in living organisms are highly complex, so I probably shouldn’t make that statement categorically, if only because some integration also occurs directly in the neuron’s cell body. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
