Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Recent years have seen a huge growth in the public awareness of neuroscience. People have become more interested in new findings about the brain, and also find brain-based explanations quite compelling. This public interest has led enterprising individuals to try to apply neuroscientific ideas to more everyday situations.

What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems.

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.

The capabilities of neurodivergent people can vary considerably from severely challenged to gifted. Some are nonverbal and fully reliant on care givers. Others have special abilities in things such as pattern recognition, memory or mathematics.  Yet even those with exceptional talents find it hard to get and hold a job. While unemployment estimates... See more

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.

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.

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).