Sunday, 25 September 2016
How Different Parts of the Brain Co-operate
Perhaps one of the hardest things to understand about the brain is the way that it is organized into networks. In this post, I will discuss a 2015 study, on the brain structures involved in delayed gratification, that makes this complex subject a bit easier to grasp. (more…)
Pleasure and Pain | Comments Closed
Wednesday, 7 September 2016
Motor cortex is required for learning but not for executing a motor skill
The motor cortex was long thought to be the part of the brain that controlled the body’s voluntary movements. Given the plasticity of the cortex as a whole, it seemed reasonable to believe that decisive changes in the connectivity of the neurons in the motor cortex might well be associated with motor learning. Although this may indeed be the case, a study published by Risa Kawai and colleagues in the journal Neuron in May 2015 forces us to reconsider the primacy of the motor cortex in learned sequences of movements, at least in rats. (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed
Monday, 22 August 2016
A good general book on neuroscience
Whenever I give a presentation about the human brain, someone almost always comes up afterward and asks me whether I could recommend a good general book on neuroscience. In fact, there are several such books, but the one that I want to recommend here today offers a special advantage: you can buy a printed copy, but you can also access the entire book on the Internet for free!
The book that I’m talking about is Neuroscience, 2nd edition, edited by Dale Purves et al. and published by Sinauer Associates in 2001. It covers wide areas of modern neuroscience and is chock-full of very informative figures and tables. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Monday, 8 August 2016
A Nanometric 3D Representation of a Mouse Cortex Cortex
The analogy between a real forest and a “forest of neurons” has been drawn many times, but the images produced most recently by the team of Jeff Lichtman and Narayanan Kasthuri (see the first two links below) make it clear yet again that the complexity of the brain’s connections far surpasses that of the densest forest.
As Lichtman has long said, by going down to the scale of the electron microscope and then reconstructing the slightest contacts between axons, dendrites, and neighbouring glial cells slice by slice, we can detect patterns that escape us at the more “macro” scales previously used to model neuronal connectivity. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Tuesday, 26 July 2016
Greening Cities Are Good for Your Health and Your Spirits
I live on a street east of Lafontaine Park, in Montreal, and I have always thought that if I weren’t “forced” to cross this large park four to eight times per day either walking or on my bike, I would never be able to stand the city and all of its drawbacks (the main reason for which is that there are just too many cars). A study published recently in the open-access journal Scientific Reports seems to confirm this subjective feeling of mine. (more…)
Mental Disorders | Comments Closed