You and Me

This validation, or refutation, could also be realised, in neuroscience terms, as associations or connectivity that could offset or cancel out the original association, the belief – but do not actually do so.

mportant issue is that beliefs can be differentiated from memories or facts in their relation to potential validation and resistance to validation once supportive inputs are present.

the plasticity of large-scale neuronal networks offers the basis for the physical mapping of memories, facts and beliefs. The

cessibility of such information will depend on its organisation in memory, namely how many associations it triggers, along with the frequency and recency of its activation.

to beliefs as ‘attitudes’ and define them as providing ‘a simple structure for organizing and handling an otherwise complex and ambiguous environment’. Th

Again, the indirect nature of the link between a gene and a final behaviour makes it pointless, just as it was for macro brain regions, to posit a clear linear chain of cause and effect.

o we can see that there is no one-to-one relationship between a single gene and a complex mental trait, even in the case of the simpler brains of mice and the exaggerated example of a single-gene disorder.

Unlike almost all other brain dysfunctions, this disorder relates just to one gene, and in this case the experimenters were able to manipulate the genes of mice so that they had the mouse equivalent of Huntington’s Chorea.

In this particular experiment the scientists worked on a gene for Huntington’s disease (Chorea).

he best way to approach the question of how we might link DNA with complex mental traits would be to take an extreme example, one where very unusually a brain dysfunction actually does relate to one single rogue gene.