News & Media
NEURO·science·letter, June 2009
The NEURO science letter is a quarterly electronic newsletter highlighting activities at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. If you have any comments, please send them to Communications. To subscribe and receive e-mail notification when a new issue becomes available, click here.
BODY SIZE IN HERBIVOROUS DINOSAURS
by David Colman, PhD, Director MNI
Evolution is a fascinating field for a scientist. It unleashes the imagination, letting you retrodict what might have happened in the distant past to guide the development of life on earth, even though you don’t have direct proof of the validity of the conclusions. And so last year Science published a “Perspectives” piece (Sander and Clauss, 322:200-201) on sauropod gigantism which provides an answer to the question, how did... More
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
“In the beginning everything was even money” Mike Caro
This quote by the mad genius of poker Mike Caro is equally applicable to the battle for survival and to the game of poker. Like poker players, individuals struggling for survival in nature must figure out which actions are likely to lead to rewards (food, sex, shelter) and which will... More
IN THE GROOVE: MOVING TO THE MUSIC
Neuropsychology refers to the study of how mental functions arise from the brain, and has a long and rich history at the MNI. Among the traditional topics of neuropsychological study—memory, language, perception, attention, planning, emotion—one does not usually encounter music. Indeed, I have sometimes been asked to justify why our laboratory focuses on music (the subtext to this question being that it seems... More
NEUROSCIENCE 101
The great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who made fundamental contributions to the study of nervous system anatomy at the turn of the 20th century, wrote, "Like the entomologist in search of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the garden of gray matter, cells with elegant and delicate forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul." Cajal's "cells with elegant and delicate forms" are neurons, the... More
