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, 26 October 2017
The Brain, The Body and the Environment: We Need All Three To Make Thinking Possible

The third and final session of my course at UPop Montréal started by asking whether our brains really process our most abstract concepts in the way proposed by cognitivist theory: that is, as arbitrary symbols that have nothing to do with the sensory modalities by which these “inputs” are entered. But as early as the 1960s, experiments with the mental rotation of objects seemed to suggest that, on the contrary, when we perform “high-level” mental manipulations of this kind, we employ the sensory regions of our brain to do so. (more…)

Body Movement and the Brain | No comments


Wednesday, 11 October 2017
The Brain and Body Are Really One, Especially When It Comes to Emotions

In April 2017, while preparing a lecture for a course on embodied cognition that I teach in French at UPop Montréal, I had to refresh my memory about the major communication pathways between the brain and the rest of the body, and one thing that struck me was just how many of these pathways there are!

I won’t talk here about the communication pathways that are part of the hormonal and immune systems. Instead, I’ll focus on the pathways in the nervous system alone. (more…)

Emotions and the Brain | No comments