News & Media
NEURO·science·letter, June 2010
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.
Neuroscience 101 Why Are Brains Consciousness?
Modern neuroscience progresses at an astonishing rate, with new
breakthroughs accumulating almost as fast as YouTube views of Justin
Beiber. Incredibly, however, the most fascinating and mysterious
property of a functioning human brain has, until quite recently, had a
tea-party-and-taxes relationship with neuroscience. That quality is
consciousness, the feeling that there is a light on inside. You have it,
your friends have it, your dog has it, but your computer, despite its vast
computational power and despite its voice recognition software and its
chatbots, does
not.
More
A tad better understanding of how our brains are wired.
The human brain is the most complex machine that you will ever encounter.
Weighing in at just over 1kg, it is a data processing marvel, capable of
simultaneously reconstructing an annotated, three-dimensional mental
representation of the room you are standing in, coordinating the fine
interactions of your more than 600 skeletal muscles, and appreciating the
complex tannins of a robust cabernet sauvignon, all effortlessly and in
parallel. On the other hand, the brain of a stage 48 Xenopus tadpole, like
the ones we study in my lab, weighs a mere 1mg (roughly one one-millionth
the mass of a human brain!). To be fair, a stage 48 tadpole has a
proportionately less intellectually demanding lifestyle, spending much of
its day swimming in a circle “hoping” a morsel of edible substance will
enter its mouth in the process -- moreover, they actually prefer to drink
water! So what exactly can this very simple tadpole brain teach us about
how our brains carry out complex perceptual tasks?
More
Building partnerships to advance knowledge
The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) is an
international leader in neurological research and clinical care and is a
key player in the larger neuroscience network across McGill. Maintaining a
position of scientific leadership in neuroscience, as well as other fields
of biomedical research, represents a major task for all top-notch
institutions. Neuroscientists all over the world are facing increasing
challenges due to the growing complexity of the questions being
investigated, escalating costs of research and intense competition for
limited research funds. McGill and The Neuro have been addressing this
situation with several initiatives to promote multidisciplinary and
collaborative interactions at local, national and international levels. A
new Integrated Program in Neuroscience, the largest of its kind in North
America, was officially launched less than one year ago to strengthen our
ability to train future generations of world-caliber neuroscientists.
Through this interdepartmental program, graduate students and postdoctoral
fellows working in research labs at The Neuro and at other McGill centres,
departments and affiliates, benefit from being part of a collegial and
integrated network that exposes them to a broad range of approaches and
activities in hundreds of neuroscience laboratories across campus.
More
