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




Tuesday, 26 September 2017
The Brain: The History of an Organ Like No Other

In the spring of 2017, I had to give a one-hour basic lecture about the human brain as part of a a free course for the general public at UPop Montréal. With so many different possibilities, deciding what approach to take in my lecture was no small challenge. In the end, I decided to start by trying to explain what the brain is not and dispelling a number of frequent misconceptions.

Most of the metaphors that compare the brain with a computer are pretty misleading, so I began by taking them apart, and then replacing them with others that better account for the selective, self-organizing dynamic processes that take place in the human brain and make the subtlest mental states possible. Thus, instead of comparing the brain to a computer, I used metaphors such as strange attractors in chaos physics and the complex flow patterns in a mountain stream—metaphors that can embrace both the long evolutionary history of the human brain, which accounts for its overall structure, and the neural networks that develop in an individual’s brain through a process of selection over that person’s lifetime. (more…)

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