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In this wide-ranging book, one of the boldest thinkers in modern neuroscience confronts an ancient philosophical problem: can we know the world as it really is? Drawing on provocative new findings about the psychophysiology of perception and judgment in both human and nonhuman primates, and also on the cultural history of science, Jean-Pierre Changeux makes a powerful case for the reality of scientific progress and argues that it forms the basis for a coherent and universal theory of human rights. On this view, belief in objective knowledge is not a mere ideological slogan or a naive confusion; it is a characteristic feature of human cognition throughout evolution, and the scientific method its most sophisticated embodiment. Seeking to reconcile science and humanism, Changeux holds that the capacity to recognize truths that are independent of subjective personal experience constitutes the foundation of a human civil society.
Over the past thirty-five years, there has been an explosive increase in scientists' ability to explain the structure and functioning of the human brain. While psychology has advanced our understanding of human behavior, various other sciences, such as anatomy, physiology, and biology, have determined the critical importance of synapses and, through the use of advanced technology, made it possible actually to see brain cells at work within the skull's walls. Here Jean-Pierre Changeux elucidates our current knowledge of the human brain, taking an interdisciplinary approach and explaining in layman's terms the complex theories and scientific breakthroughs that have significantly improved our understanding in the twentieth century.
What lies at the heart of neuronal plasticity? Accumulating evidence points to epigenetics. This word originally indicated potentially heritable modifications in gene expression that do not involve changes in DNA sequence. Today this definition is much less strict, and epigenetic control is thought to include DNA methylation, histone modifications, histone variants, microRNA metabolic pathways and non-histone proteins modifications. Thus, while neuronal plasticity is rightly thought to be intimately associated to genomic control, it is critical to appreciate that there is much more to the genome than DNA sequence. Recent years have seen spectacular advances in the field of epigenetics. These...
Do numbers and the other objects of mathematics enjoy a timeless existence independent of human minds, or are they the products of cerebral invention? Do we discover them, as Plato supposed and many others have believed since, or do we construct them? Does mathematics constitute a universal language that in principle would permit human beings to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations elsewhere in the universe, or is it merely an earthly language that owes its accidental existence to the peculiar evolution of neuronal networks in our brains? Does the physical world actually obey mathematical laws, or does it seem to conform to them simply because physicists have increasingly been abl...
The NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Cellular and Molecular Control of Direct Cell Interactions in Developing System" has been attended by 15 invited main lecturers and 60 participants. According to its purpose senior scientists, postdoctoral trainees and graduate students working in areas like biology, biochemistry, electrophysiology, medicine etc . . . could discuss their common interest in the various structural, ultrastructural, molecular and functional aspects of cell interactions in developing in vivo and in vitro systems. Whereas the topics of the first week have been mostly concerned with the general aspects of cell interactions in embryogenesis (section I and II of this book), the ...
International Review of Neurobiology
Volume 1: General Introduction to Molecular Sciences Volume 2: Physical Aspects of Molecular Systems Volume 3: Electronic Structure and Chemical Reactivity Volume 4: Molecular Phenomena in Biological Sciences
Will understanding our brains help us to know our minds? Or is there an unbridgeable distance between the work of neuroscience and the workings of human consciousness? In a remarkable exchange between neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this book explores the vexed territory between these divergent approaches--and comes to a deeper, more complex perspective on human nature. Ranging across diverse traditions, from phrenology to PET scans and from Spinoza to Charles Taylor, What Makes Us Think? revolves around a central issue: the relation between the facts (or "what is") of science and the prescriptions (or "what ought to be") of ethics. Changeux and Ricoeur ask:...
Volume 1: General Introduction to Molecular Sciences Volume 2: Physical Aspects of Molecular Systems Volume 3: Electronic Structure and Chemical Reactivity Volume 4: Molecular Phenomena in Biological Sciences
This workshop was the second of this series held on the island of santorini in the Cycladic Sea. The first one ("Mechanism of Action of the Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor", NATO ASI Se ries H, vol. 10) took place in May 1986 and focused on what was at the time the best studied of all neuroreceptors. This second one, held only two years later, demonstrates the im mense progress achieved since then in the field of neurorecep tors and ion channels. Molecular cloning techniques have now made available the primary structures of a whole array of ion channel proteins, and this in turn has shed light on some gen eral principles of the structure-function relationships of these central elements of intercellular communication. The purpose of this workshop was to explore the common ele ments in gene and protein structure of already cloned ion channel proteins, and to assess the status of other cloning projects in progress. It explicitly focused on very recently published and unpublished results. All participants kept to these goals thereby demonstrating the very value of such work shops for the progress of science.