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, 14 August 2013
A Monthly Podcast On Cognitive Science

Do you love in-depth interviews with famous names in the vast field of cognitive science? Does the idea of spending an hour with philosopher Patricia Churchland, neurobiologist Christof Koch, or affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp sound pretty good to you? Then you have to take a look at the web site Brain Science Podcast!

Brain Science Podcast was created in 2006 by Dr. Ginger Campbell, an emergency physician with a passionate interest in the brain, consciousness, and the medical implications of the mind-body relationship, and she has been hosting it ever since. From one month to the next, she alternates between interviews with scientists who are leaders in their fields and detailed reports on recent books on topics in which she is interested.

Over the years, Dr. Campbell’s podcasts have covered just about every subject that we discuss here in The Brain from Top to Bottom. To cite just one example, Brain Science Podcast Episode 30 talks about the evolution of language, on the basis of the first part of the book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally. In this podcast, Dr. Campbell summarizes the fascinating history of the study of the evolution of language, which has gone from an almost taboo subject to a very active new area of investigation. The discussion includes encounters with Noam Chomsky and his reluctance to acknowledge the value of this field of study, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her experiments on the language abilities of bonobo apes, Philip Leiberman and his research on motor control of language, Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, and many more.

The podcasts are all the more entertaining because Dr. Campbell is not at all shy about sharing her own thoughts and intuitions about the subjects discussed. For instance, her comments on the important implications that recent discoveries about the brain’s plasticity have for the evolution of language help us to understand what drives progress in a scientific research field such as this.

i_lien The Evolution of Language (BSP 30)
i_lien Brain Science Podcast
i_lien Past Episodes

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