Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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.

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.

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.

While thinking in maps may first bring to mind the idea of cartography, a map does not need to be geographic—it can be any symbolic depiction of the relationship between elements of some physical or mental space, such as themes, objects, or areas.

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).

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.