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What Are People’s Deepest Motivations?
Economists have long regarded financial gain as one of the primary motives that drive human beings. But research in the cognitive sciences increasingly shows that while money may induce people to work...
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Links on Pleasure and Drugs
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. For each link, I also provide a brief...
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Links on Avoiding Pain
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...
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Rhythms, Pain and Consciousness in Invertebrates
This week we’d like to offer you a sort of “seafood cocktail”: links to discussions of three fundamental questions of neurobiology, as investigated using three different kinds of marine invertebrates:...
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Device screens: tools of liberation, or enslavement?
As a parent, I sometimes find my patience sorely tried when my teen is so busy playing with his iPod that I have to call him 50 times for dinner. He’s not impressed when I tell him that what he’s...
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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...
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Learning Empathy
The existence of empathy and altruistic behaviour among various species of animals has been amply demonstrated. Among elephants, examples include comforting members of the herd who are frightened,...
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“Winner effect” Makes Subordinate Mice Dominant
This week I’d like to tell you about an experiment by Hailan Hu and his team at Zhejiang University, in China. These researchers used optogenetic methods and various wavelengths of light to excite or...
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A neuroscientist gets drunk to explain alcohol’s effects on the brain
And that’s not all she does! She also explains the effects of sugar on the body/brain by eating candy, the effects of insomnia by staying up all night, the effects of the flu when she has it herself...
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Neural correlates of mathematical beauty
This week I’d like to tell you about a study published in 2014, entitled “The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates”. We know that mathematicians have long talked about...
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