In the 1930s and 1940s, rats’ ability to learn their way through a maze was explained, according to the behaviourist paradigm prevailing at that time, as simply a process of building connections between sensory stimuli and behavioural responses. When a rat found its way through a maze successfully, it reached the final chamber where it received a reward of food, According to behaviourist theory, this reward strengthened the neural connections underlying the associations that the…

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In the 1930s and 1940s, rats’ ability to learn their way through a maze was explained, according to the behaviourist paradigm prevailing at that time, as simply a process of building connections between sensory stimuli and behavioural responses. When a rat found its way through a maze successfully, it reached the final chamber where it received a reward of food, According to behaviourist theory, this reward strengthened the neural connections underlying the associations that the…

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Which of the following is your memory most like: 1) a huge library where all your memories are shelved? 2) a computer hard drive where data are stored in a binary code of 0s and 1s? 3) a dresser with lots of drawers full of memories? 4) the game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to the next until it ends up being distorted? Regular readers of this blog will have quickly discarded…

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Which of the following is your memory most like: 1) a huge library where all your memories are shelved? 2) a computer hard drive where data are stored in a binary code of 0s and 1s? 3) a dresser with lots of drawers full of memories? 4) the game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to the next until it ends up being distorted? Regular readers of this blog will have quickly discarded…

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This week I want to tell you about a highly educational website that offers a wealth of information about neuroscience. Its name is Neuroscientifically Challenged, and its author is Marc Dingman. Dingman began blogging about neuuroscience in 2008, as his interest in the subject was growing. He took a break from writing the site in 2010 to concentrate on finishing his doctorate in neuroscience, which he received in 2014, when he also accepted a teaching…

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The word “hominids” is often used to refer to the human line that diverged from chimpanzees some 6 or 7 million years ago. It includes not only all the species of the genus Homo, bus also some related genera, such as Australopithecus, that are now extinct. The evolutionary history of our human line has been determined from findings of fossils, some consisting of just a few bone fragments or teeth. These fossils have shown that…

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Sometimes you think you know all about a subject because you’ve been making presentations about it for years, or even decades. But then you read one article that makes you realize just how much you didn’t know. That’s what just happened to me. The subject was synaptic transmission, and the article was Synaptic vesicles transiently dock to refill release sites, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September 2020. The principal authors of this study,…

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Two recent studies have shown yet again that many more different parts of the brain are often involved in a given mental phenomenon than was once believed. In the brain, nothing is really isolated, and there are no “centres” of anything. Instead, we’re always dealing with multiple interconnected areas of the brain that form networks as demanded by the situations faced or the tasks to be performed. What’s most interesting about these two particular studies…

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I recently came across a little experiment that I posted years ago on this website to show how the blind spot in each of your eyes works. The blind spot is a part of the retina where there are no photoreceptors, because it is where the axons of the retina’s ganglion cells converge and exit the eye, forming the optical nerve. As a result, there’s a corresponding area in your field of vision that doesn’t…

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Today I’m going to talk about the work of social psychologist Paul Piff, whose research interests revolve around social hierarchies, economic inequality, altruism and co-operation. I learned about Piff while working on a French-language documentary inspired by the book Capital in the 21st Century, by French economist Thomas Piketty. In this documentary, Piff explains an experiment in which people playing the board game Monopoly showed disturbing changes in behaviour when they won repeatedly because the…

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