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




Wednesday, 4 July 2018
Explaining Science Not at Three Levels But at Five

This week I’d like to draw your attention to a series of videos that the U.S. magazine Wired published on YouTube in spring 2017. In each episode of this series, an expert in a particular scientific field explain a complex concept in that field to five different people: a 5-year-old, a teenager, a college student, a graduate student and a colleague who is also an expert in that field. Thus you watch the expert explain the same concept five times—from the simplest possible explanation for the 5-year-old to a high-level discussion with the colleague. This is a highly original teaching approach that you don’t see very often, except on some websites where you can drill down from a simpler explanation to a second, more advanced one, or on a certain website about the human brain that provides three levels of explanation at five levels of organization (and whose author clearly must be obsessed with levels, probably because he read too much Laborit in his youth ;-P ).

So you can understand why I couldn’t resist telling you about this web series, especially since one of the episodes deals with the connectome, a neuroscientific research topic that I have discussed previously in this blog and also teach in some of the courses that I give in French in Montreal.

As Bobby Kasthuri, the guest researcher in the episode that I’m talking about, explains, many laboratories in the world are using a wide variety of methods to attempt to map the connections among the neurons in the human brain, with an accuracy down to the level of the individual synapse. But this is no easy task, because the brain has about 86 billion neurons, each of which can receive several thousand synaptic connections from other neurons. In fact, given the brain’s great plasticity and its ability to form new neural connections throughout an individual’s lifetime, a strong version of the concept of the connectome is practically unimaginable. But just as the map of the human genome may not have revealed all of the secrets of genetic diseases but is still an indispensable tool for raising new questions about them, a more accurate knowledge of the human connectome can only help us to better understand how the brain works and perhaps even to gain insight into certain mental disorders.

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