Will we ever understand the brain? Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence? Will Humankind be surpassed by machines? Harvard neuroscientist Florian Engert shares his views on these matters. If you happened to walk by […]
Category: Interview
Doris Tsao, the woman who cracked the code the brain uses to recognize faces
How can our brain discriminate and identify a particular face among a virtually infinite number of extremely similar faces? Doris Tsao has solved this enigma. In one of his most famous clinical tales, The Man […]
Carmen Sandi: “There is a causal link between mitochondrial function and rank in social hierarchy”
Can brain biology negatively affect an individual’s position in society? The answer seems to be yes – and the mitochondria (the cell’s batteries) appear to be an important player. Could this negative impact be reduced […]
John Krakauer: “We’re in the grips of a totalizing belief in data and techniques”
Will the study of the most fine-grained neural workings of the brain, thanks to ever more powerful techniques, enable researchers to claim they understand the brain and the behaviors it produces? There are serious reasons […]
Linda Partridge: “We want to tackle old age ill health”
Scientists hope that one day a “cocktail” of drugs will be available to allow people to live full lives until the very end by averting the major killer diseases that accompany ageing, such as dementia, […]
Zach Mainen:“We create this incredibly complicated illusion of the real world that is what we experience all the time”
It is a part of every waking moment of our lives. But whenever scientists have tried to study it, consciousness has slipped through their fingers. Will we ever understand why we have it and how […]
“We made the patients become a dolphin swimming in the ocean”
“What is a guy like you doing in a place like this?” Simply put, that’s what we were curious to find about american scientist John Krakauer, from Johns Hopkins University. Since 2014, has […]
“We had a behavior that could be measured as a physical property”
Did some genes evolve to “tell” a little desert mouse whether to dig a big or a small burrow, and whether to equip it with an emergency exit? Did other genes evolve to […]
“I was always curious about how the small details add up to form the world we are living in”
(Legendado em português) Sabine Renninger still remembers the day she had her first samples under the microscope in school. The possibility of expanding her view of the world and zooming into the unknown […]
“The immune system is needed for repair and lifelong maintenance of the brain”
Two decades ago, it was anathema to go against the established idea that the nervous system doesn’t need the immune system at all for its protection or repair. But Michal Schwartz, who pioneered […]