Anne-Laure Le Cunff

People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Some of this diversity is due to neurological differences. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning.

As its goal is to take neuroscience out of the lab and into the real world, applied neuroscience draws knowledge from many areas of science, from psychology to molecular biology.

These tasks, along with creative idea generation tasks used in our laboratory, constitute useful tools in uncovering possible brain correlates of creative thinking. Nevertheless, much more work is needed in order to establish reliable and valid measures of creative thinking, in particular measures of novelty or originality of creative insights.

Educational neuroscience is a thriving field of research, and there are many excellent and doubtless well-meaning researchers doing rigorous and valuable work in the area. Unfortunately, there are also businesses that want to exploit teachers’ lack of experience and middle-class parental anxieties about school attainment.

In French, “cultiver son jardin intérieur” means to tend to your internal garden—to take care of your mind. The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits).

Neurodiverse people frequently need workplace accommodations, such as headphones to prevent auditory overstimulation, to activate or maximally leverage their abilities. Sometimes they exhibit challenging eccentricities. In many cases the accommodations and challenges are manageable and the potential returns are great. But to realize the benefits,... See more

First, researchers created a gene which could be recombined in various arrangements to express one of four different colours. Then, multiple copies of this gene were inserted in the genome of mice or other species, resulting in the random expression of various colour ratios.

Central to neurodiversity is the idea that naturally occurring variations in the human brain should be seen as differences rather than deficits. Some people consider neurodiversity to be related to the concept of biodiversity — a term you will mostly see being used for the purpose of advocating for the conservation of species. 

Due to the random nature in the expression of these genes, researchers are currently unable to precisely control the labeling process, which makes it very hard to identify specific neurons. They get a good idea of what the circuit looks like, but not exactly which class of cells each neuron belongs to.