Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends — It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Chiefly because neuroscience stops churning out new stuff and we get to draw breath before plunging anew into the maelstrom. …

How researchers are changing the brain’s messaging system to tackle mental health disorders — There’s a disturbingly long list of ways in which the brain can go wrong. I might name for you a sample of mental health conditions: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety disorders of all kinds, obsessive compulsive disorder. Even just the list of movement disorders is miserably long: Parkinson’s disease…

The worm turns against genetic determinism — There’s a strangely persistent idea that your genes are the blueprint for your brain. Robert Plomin even called his book about the genetic influence on the mind “Blueprint”. But a blueprint is a detailed one-to-one schematic of what will be constructed. Genes are not that. Self-evidently not. For example, people…

What the pandemic revealed about scientific publishing — I was reading my umpteenth news story about Covid-19 science, a story about the latest research into how to make indoor spaces safe from infection, about whether cleaning surfaces or changing the air was more important. And it was bothering me. Not because it was dull (which, of course, it…

Why we can’t put your mind in the machine — Immortality awaits. As you draw your dying breath, we will inject a preservative into your brain that will fix in place every one of the trillion or so connections between your 86 billion neurons. We will then trace those wires, building the complete map of your brain’s connections, your “connectome”…

It’s how your brain works, after all — Neurons. Over the deep time of Earth’s history, these tiny bags of chemicals have joined forces, swarming together in gargantuan numbers, all to make a brain. In cahoots, these neurons do everything you do: sense, think, move; sleep, dream, and cogitate. Eat cake. Watch telly. …