Tag: neuroscience
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The brain is overrated: a look at cognition in slime mould
Historical, scientific and philosophical adventure into the nature of consciousness seems to have, nine times out of ten, made the assumption that cognition should be explored within the kingdom of animalia. This top down approach seeks to derive a mechanism for consciousness from that which we already know, rather than from first principles of computation.…
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Concerns raised over mini-brain sentience
Scientists have raised ethical concerns over rapidly advancing work growing human brains. This month at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, scientists from the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego called for a suspension on mini-brain research until an ethical framework guide had been developed. They warned that some researchers are becoming “perilously close” to…
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Neuroscientist Gina Rippon dismantled the myth of the ‘female brain’
The work of Dr Gina Rippon has veered into controversial territory. More controversial, in fact, than you might expect, given that her primary research question is simply “how do brains become different from each other?” The source of much of this controversy is a book that she has written entitled “The Gendered brain,” which challenges…
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A genetic link between inflammation and depression?
Whilst there are many different cell types in our body, each contains the same DNA. In order to perform their particular roles, the cell types react differently to the DNA’s instructions by controlling when and how much each gene is expressed. There are entire subsets of genes whose only function is to regulate the expression…