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, 10 August 2015
What’s running our show?

Deric Bownds, director of the Biology of Mind program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently gave a lecture at this institution’s seminar series on chaos and complexity. The lecture was entitled “Upstairs/Downstairs in our brains – What’s running our show?” (You can find the full text by following the link at the bottom of this post.) Its subject was the increasingly common distinction, in the literature on the brain, between bottom-up and top-down control. This literature also employs other metaphors for opposing processes in the brain, such as the famous System 1 (fast and unconscious) versus System 2 (slower and conscious), the “upstairs/downstairs” metaphor in the title of Bownd’s lecture, and the distinction between the attention network (the parts in blue in the illustration here) and the default mode network (the parts in orange). (more…)

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