Why stop here?

Stop Asking Why There’s Anything

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it s...

Compulsivity and impulsivity-personal reflections: why now and why here?

This issue of CNS Spectrums contains a unique collection of manuscripts that examine compulsivity and impulsivity from a broad range of perspectives and helps to shape our evolving understanding of compulsivity and impulsivity as orthogonal symptom dimensions arising from parallel tightly regulated brain circuits giving rise to a spectrum of overlapping diagnostic categories.

Why Won't Our Patients Stop Smoking?

H ealth risks related to tobacco use have been well established for 50 years, with diseases including lung cancer, other malignancies, and cardiovascular diseases linked to smoking and causing early mortality in current and former smokers (1– 4). Yet cigarette smoking remains highly prevalent in both the developing and developed worlds (5). Smoking uptake typically occurs in the teenage years, ...

Remind me again: why are we here?

Reliability of axonal propagation: the spike doesn't stop here.

N in the central nervous system are characterized by complex axonal arborization patterns. For example, the principal neurons of the cerebral cortex, the pyramidal cells, send axonal projections locally and distally to both cortical and subcortical targets (1), to ultimately communicate with other neurons through thousands of synaptic terminals. The axon normally is considered a very reliable t...