The brain is an organ of extraordinary complexity. At a genetic level, over half of our genes are dedicated to the brain – building it and keeping it functional over a lifetime. At a cognitive level, the brain controls the ways we react to every situation and how the consequences of these reactions, according to reward or punishment, shape us as individuals.
To understand these things at a mechanistic level is a huge challenge – one that transcends biology. It increasingly involves novel alliances with mathematicians, physical scientists, computational scientists, psychologists and philosophers, and yields intellectual capital that stretches from pharmacology, psychiatry and philosophy through to education, engineering, ethics and economics.
When it became clear nearly ten years ago that neuroscience was growing at an extraordinarily fast rate and across a huge range of disciplinary lines, the University set up Cambridge Neuroscience. Today this Strategic Research Initiative consists of over 700 researchers in more than 60 different departments across the University of Cambridge and its local institutes.
**Professor Ed Bullmore and Professor Bill Harris are Co-Chairs and Dr Dervila Glynn is the Coordinator of Cambridge Neuroscience.
Image: Growth cones of retinal axons (purple) growing among cells in the brain (green)
Credit: Hanno Svoboda
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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