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




Monday, 21 January 2013
When Fear Makes Us React Conservatively

Paul Nail and his colleagues at the University of Central Arkansas conducted a series of three experiments that showed how a psychologically threatening situation can make someone whose thinking is usually liberal adopt a more conservative position. The adjectives “liberal” and “conservative” should be understood here in their general sense, where the former describes an attitude favouring openness, empathy, communication, and social justice, while the latter emphasizes tradition, order, authority, and discipline. (more…)

Emotions and the Brain | Comments Closed


Monday, 14 January 2013
Links on Forgetting and Amnesia

This week, as I have before in this blog, I am posting a set of new links to other web sites that discuss a subject covered in The Brain from Top to Bottom. The subject this week is the sub-topic “Forgetting and Amnesia” under the topic “Memory and the Brain”. For each link, I also provide a brief description of the content on the site in question. (more…)

Memory and the Brain | Comments Closed


Monday, 7 January 2013
Eight Problems with Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons are neurons with fascinating characteristics that were discovered in monkeys in the mid-1990s. Located mainly in Area F5 of the cortex, these neurons are activated not only when a monkey performs a specific action but also when that monkey simply sees another monkey perform that same action. This is surprising behaviour, to say the least, for neurons located in a motor area of the cortex.

Since just about the same area (the premotor area) exists in the human brain, it is highly likely that humans also have mirror neurons. But the data that have been gathered on this subject remain controversial, because of constraints on experiments with human beings. (more…)

Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed


Monday, 31 December 2012
Speaking Without Broca’s Area

From Dr. Paul Broca’s observations in the 1860s, we know that the left inferior frontal cortex of the brain, now also known as Broca’s area, is heavily involved in human language abilities. At first, this area was thought to be associated only with the production of language, but gradually its role has come to be regarded as more complex, and recent brain-imaging data have actually made the old dichotomy between language-production areas and language-understanding areas somewhat obsolete. (more…)

From Thought to Language | Comments Closed


Monday, 24 December 2012
What does it mean to be human?

The web site What does it mean to be human? was developed by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.. Dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge on the evolution of the human species, this site, with its graphics evoking the African savanna, the cradle of humanity, addresses myriad questions that will arouse the curiosity of a wide audience—questions such as:

How do evolution and Darwinian natural selection work?
What is the relationship between humans and the species of apes alive today?
Did humans evolve in a straight line, one species after another?
How can scientists estimate the age of a fossil, or the climate conditions a million years ago?
Is the concept of evolution compatible with religion? (more…)

Evolution and the Brain | Comments Closed