Igorreverchuk

While many core biological processes are conserved across species, the human brain has evolved with unique capacities. Current understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms that endow human traits as well as associated vulnerabilities remains limited. However, emerging data have illuminated species divergence in DNA elements and genome organization, in molecular, morphological, and functional features of conserved neural cell types, as well as temporal differences in brain development. Here, we summarize recent data on unique features of the human brain and their complex implications for the study and treatment of brain diseases. We also consider key outstanding questions in the field and discuss the technologies and foundational knowledge that will be required to accelerate understanding of human neurobiology.

To not only survive, but also thrive, the brain must efficiently orchestrate distributed computation across space and time. This requires hierarchical organisation facilitating fast information transfer and processing at the lowest possible metabolic cost. Quantifying brain hierarchy is difficult but can be estimated from the asymmetry of information flow. Thermodynamics has successfully characterised hierarchy in many other complex systems. Here, we propose the ‘Thermodynamics of Mind’ framework as a natural way to quantify hierarchical brain orchestration and its underlying mechanisms. This has already provided novel insights into the orchestration of hierarchy in brain states including movie watching, where the hierarchy of the brain is flatter than during rest. Overall, this framework holds great promise for revealing the orchestration of cognition.

In this article, James Gibson’s influential notion of “perceptual affordances” is applied to the romantic realm. The core idea of Gibson’s view rests on the possible, meaningful actions that the pe...

In many scientific fields, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the way with which text and other modalities of data (e.g., molecules and proteins) are dealt, achieving superior...

In this article, James Gibson’s influential notion of “perceptual affordances” is applied to the romantic realm. The core idea of Gibson’s view rests on the possible, meaningful actions that the pe...