For decades, researchers have placed electrodes on the skull, but technology’s march toward miniaturization has now enabled Robert Knight, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Berkeley's Helen Willis Neuroscience Institute to set his delicate crosshatch of electrodes directly on the brain.
We have entered the second generation of contemporary neuroscience. In the first generation, we mapped parts of the brain by function. Now we must understand the meaning of interactions among the parts, the way they use each other and time to function as a whole. This network of interactions, many researchers believe, is in some way responsible for our consciousness. [Read More]

In a rapidly developing field called epigenetics, scientists are discovering that nutrition, exposure to toxics, even a mother's touch (or lack thereof) can cause heritable changes in gene expression without any corresponding change in DNA sequence. This is a radically different view of heredity, one that adds another layer of complexity to the common conception of DNA as the complete and immutable set of instructions for life. Daniela Kaufer (left) and Darlene Francis are working to better understand how external influences affect gene expression. [Read More]