Beginner blog for The Brain from Top to Bottom website
The word consciousness may refer simply to the state in which you are awake, as opposed to states in which you are not (for example, when you re asleep, or in a coma, or under general anaesthesia). But the word consciousness may also refer to the content to which you have conscious access (for example, memories, [ ]
In a field like neuroscience, there s so much knowledge, and it s changing so constantly, that often, when you read about one discovery, you can best understand its importance in light of another discovery that you hadn t even heard of before. That s what happened to me when I read this article explaining a major advance in [ ]
This week, I ll address two different topics from the angle that is so central to my website and my book about the human brain: the various levels at which the human brain and the human mind are organized. My first topic today is how the neurons of the hippocampus are affected by chronic stress. The [ ]
In December 2025, I migrated my website The Brain from Top to Bottom from www.thebrain.mcgill.ca to www.thebrain.lecerveau.ca. (If you have visited the site since then, you may not even have noticed, because if you type the old address into your browser, you are now redirected to the new one automatically, and that new address appears [ ]
Last September, thanks to doctoral student Anne Monnier, I had the chance to visit the laboratory where she is doing her research, directed by Guillaume Dumas at the CHU Ste-Justine research centre in Montreal. I have written about Dumas in an earlier post in this blog, in which I described the hyperscanning technique being used [ ]
Your brain accounts for only about 2% of your body weight, but 20 to 25% of all the oxygen and glucose that your body consumes. Why this vast disparity? Until about 20 years ago, people tended to think of the brain as an organ that waited passively for stimuli and then reacted to them. But [ ]
The human brain is often described as having two main ways of thinking: one of them fast, automatic and unconscious, the other slower, more flexible and requiring conscious control. Each of them has its own benefits and drawbacks. The first—let’s call it “System 1”—is based on the sum of the habits, stereotypes and received ideas that [ ]
This week I want to encourage you to watch a video entitled How Your Brain Chooses What To Remember , at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFFEmkxTLg. This video is one of many posted on the YouTube channel of computational neuroscientist Arsem Kirsanov. Kirsanov worked in the laboratory of neurologist Gyorgy Buzsaki , and Kirsanov s videos about the hippocampus are truly [ ]
For we humans, the most important part of the ecosystem that we live in is definitely the other human beings who live in it. We have thus developed a strong interdependence by discovering, at a very early age, our need to cooperate with one another and the benefits that this cooperation brings. If you need [ ]
Phenomena such as racism, sexism and ageism become more understandable in light of our strong biological tendency to divide the world into two groups: the one we belong to, and everyone else. In all primates, including humans, the sight of a stranger causes the brain to activate its “danger” pattern in less than a tenth [ ]