Anne-Laure Le Cunff

What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems.

Educational neuroscience is a thriving field of research, and there are many excellent and doubtless well-meaning researchers doing rigorous and valuable work in the area. Unfortunately, there are also businesses that want to exploit teachers’ lack of experience and middle-class parental anxieties about school attainment.

Along with identifying common office issues like noise pollution, the study points out less obvious stressors such as surfaces that have uncomfortable textures, temperatures for people with sensory hypersensitivity, or “visual noise” like distracting patterns on walls. A neurotypical person might not notice these environmental details, but they can... See more

Due to the random nature in the expression of these genes, researchers are currently unable to precisely control the labeling process, which makes it very hard to identify specific neurons. They get a good idea of what the circuit looks like, but not exactly which class of cells each neuron belongs to.