Scientific experiments don’t generally attract widespread attention. But the ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ (1999) experiment of visual attention by the American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris has become a classic. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman highlights this experiment and argues that it reveals something fundamental about the human mind, namely,…

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Do Adult Brains Make New Neurons?

In 1928, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, proclaimed that the brains of adult humans never make new neurons. “Once development was ended,” he wrote, “the founts of growth and regeneration … dried up irrevocably. In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing…

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