In August 2012, 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 31, 2013. Ever since we got this news, the little team that produces this web site has been looking for a new source of stable institutional funding so that we can continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience.

We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work. We are still in negotiations with some of them, which may prove fruitful within the next few months. But so far, we have not managed to find the funding we need. For the moment, 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.

The "fundraising thermometer" that you see below shows, in order of priority, from the bottom up, what work we plan to do with the money that we raise and how much money we still need to raise to meet our annual budget. We will update this thermometer regularly, so that readers always have an accurate picture of our finances.

Please rest assured that we are doing our utmost to keep this site accessible in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no advertising.

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





Funding Update

April 22, 2013

It has been only two weeks since we began our fundraising drive for The Brain from Top to Bottom, and we have already received nearly $2 500. That will be enough to pay for basic maintenance and management of the site for the coming year and to write blog posts for the next few weeks. These results are very encouraging. Please pass the word to anyone else you know who enjoys this site and might want to might want to help fund the rest of its activities. And thank you so much for your support!



Friday, 23 March 2012
Our Blog Now On Line!

blog

Here it is, The Brain from Top to Bottom blog. And it’s hard to miss, because we’ve built it right into the web site’s home page. Why? Because for us, the blog and the site are now inseparable, interactive parts of a whole, each referring you to the other for more information.

As you can see from the first post above, each week we will be providing a summary of a recent scientific study in the vast field of cognitive neuroscience. In that sense, this blog is just a series of posts like any other. But each summary will also include clickable text links to pages in The Brain from Top to Bottom that we have selected specifically to help you understand the study in question. Thus this blog provides yet another way of accessing the web site’s encyclopedic content.

And that’s not all, because it works in the other direction too: whenever we add a blog post with links to pages on our web site, we also provide direct links from those pages to the blog post. As shown above, these links appear in the left-hand column of each page, right below the links to the various supplementary information modules (Tool, History, etc.), under the heading “On this subject in the blog”. The link to each post is its title, displayed as clickable text.

Basically, these links serve as sidebars that we will be adding from week to week to keep the site’s content up to date, in addition to the modules that we are already adding regularly.

By constantly drawing these close connections between the latest developments in neuroscience and the content of the reference site that The Brain from Top to Bottom has become, we will continue to build a unique, interactive site that makes the human nervous system in all its marvelous complexity accessible to all our readers.

From the Simple to the Complex, Uncategorized | 1 comment

One comment at; “Our Blog Now On Line!”

  1. Michael Robinson says:
    April 2, 2012 at 12:23 pm

    The best site of its kind, bar none. My particular fascination is with the evolution of our modern brain and how it rocketed from the 400 cc brain of Australopithecus Afarensis to our 1400 cc modern computational miracle in just 2.5 million years. If one cc of our brain contains more than 400 billion neural connections, the math puts our total capacity at 400 trillion connections and an unfathomable subset of possible neural pathways. Math is not my forte, but try dividing 400 trillion by 2.5 million and the result is a mind bender, to say the least. Love this site!!!

    Reply

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