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In his opening chapter of the biological art compendium “Signs of Life,”  Eduardo Kac  makes a particularly suggestive comment about the biological sciences in general.  I think this quote has even more significance to neuroscience specifically: “The extreme difficulty in dealing with very complex biological interactions leads to the simplified treatment of life processes as quantified data that exhibit statistical patterns.  In turn, this can lead to an objectification of life and a disregard for the subjects and their rights.”[1] From Zachary Weinersmith's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal This claim seems to echo Tom Wolfe's sentiment that scientific progress will lead to the death of the soul [2]: by reducing biological systems down to so many quantities and equations (all accurate within some statistical bounds), have we lost an important intuition about their intrinsic worth?  Is biology really just physical laws, with the same degree of moral importance ...

In their article, “ Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research ,” Daniel A. Hackman, Martha J. Farah , and Michael J. Meaney explore how low socioeconomic status (SES) affects underlying cognitive and affective neural systems. They identify and focus on two sets of factors that determine the relationship between SES and cognitive development: (1) the environmental factors or ‘mechanisms’ that demonstrably mediate SES and brain development; and (2) those neurocognitive systems that are most strongly affected by low SES, including language processing and executive function.  They argue that “these findings provide a unique opportunity for understanding how environmental factors can lead to individual differences in brain development, and for improving the programmes and policies that are designed to alleviate SES-related disparities in mental health and academic achievement” [1]. Neuroscience can tell us how SES may affect her brain. Can ...