The Brave New Brain World

This cannot be explained solely by the fact that we all have a brain. After all, there is no market for the dissemination of magazines on nephrology or biochemical targeting the lay public. At the meeting between mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and the arts, neuroscience fascinates more and more people with the possibility of understanding the mechanisms underlying emotions, thoughts, actions, disease and madness, learning and forgetting, dreams and imagination, phenomena that altogether define and conform the mental life of our species. In particular, health professionals, therapists, teachers and legislators can now begin to take practical ownership of the vast mass of empirical data on genes, proteins, cells, circuits and whole organisms accumulated in the past century. But the translation of novel experimental findings into new techniques and innovative processes is not simple, and the knowledge recently generated nearly always remains opaque to non-specialists. How to interpret the new findings of neuroscience? What do they mean, which changes they may cause, and how far may they lead us?