A recently published paper on the neuroscience of drug addiction raises ethical and policy issues arising out of addiction. The paper concludes social and economic circumstances contribute towards the propensity of individuals to become addicted.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, defined consciousness as the greatest unsolved problem in biology. The first major international conference of the Human Brain Project, held recently in Barcelona, has focused on the challenges and advances in its study. Jesús Méndez, of the scientific news agecy SINC, spoke with the local organiser of the conference, Mavi Sánchez Vives.

HBP scientist Marcello Massimini believes we are close to a profound leap in our understanding of consciousness – he likens it to the moment before Charles Darwin began mining the rich seams of evidence that led to the theory of evolution.

There is a group of densely interconnected regions in the brain known as the ‘rich club’ whose purpose is speculated to be a ‘central high capacity backbone for brain communication’.

HBP neuroscientist Gustavo Deco talks about his work with CHAMPMouse, an HBP partnering project investigating the circuitous network of connections that are activated when we do something as simple as distinguishing objects with our sight.

Article by SINC media

A region of the brain that extends through both hemispheres, the planum temporale, is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere. In the 1960s, this finding was linked to the hosting of language processing in the left hemisphere, but new research from one of the Human Brain Project’s research partners has shown this asymmetry is not a marker of language lateralisation.

Three times a second, 10,000 times every hour, your eyes saccade, jump in unison, shifting their focus from one spot in the visual field to another. And yet the world never appears to leap about or shake as it would if a camera were doing the same. Why?

New research shows the brain remains interconnected during non-REM sleep, which was thought not to happen.