Poverty and the Developing Brain
People love “Rags to Riches” stories—those sanguine tales in which someone who grew up in poverty manages to become extremely wealthy and professionally successful.
People love “Rags to Riches” stories—those sanguine tales in which someone who grew up in poverty manages to become extremely wealthy and professionally successful.
A friend of mine was skeptical about whether behavioral scientists actually need to understand the brain.
A friend of mine shared this simple thought: “My ultimate goal is to change people’s behavior. Behavior change techniques are powerful enough tools. I do not need to know what the brain does.”
Most theories of consciousness, says Neuroscientist Michael Graziano, rely on magic. They point to a feature of the brain—vibrating neurons for instance—and claim that feature to be the source of consciousness.
With the singular, ambitious goal of understanding exactly how the brain works, the BRAIN Initiative was announced as one of Obama’s “Grand Challenges,” meant to be on par in scale and impact with the Human Genome Project.
Over the past few years, MIT neuroscientists Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez have been bringing ideas that might only seem possible in science fiction to reality.