In the first blog in this series, we quoted this passage from Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Unholy Loves: Making love with him in the customary dark, she had often thought, though every instinct in her ...

What makes us human? According to neurobiologists it is our neocortex. This outer layer of the brain is rich in neurons and lets us do abstract thinking, create art, and speak complex languages. An ...

The human subcortex (figure 1, brown/beige), underneath the neocortex, has not changed much in the last 500 million years. It is thought to be like electricity for a TV, necessary for consciousness, ...