Robert and Carl Zimmer teamed up tonight to moderate a brain mapping brouhaha live at Columbia University. The subject: does the brain's wiring make us who we are? The event has ended, but thanks to everyone who tuned in for the live webcast (and the lively web chat archived below).

Inspired by Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Ellen Horne puts her mind to the task of explaining the two (sometimes in sync, sometimes at odds) operating systems that our brains use to solve problems. Try out your own systems here.

Here's something you should know about yourself. Vowels control your brain.

I love illusions, where your brain makes weird things happen. Those of you who come here often have seen some doozies, but this one ... oooh, this is one of the strangest.

In this short, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.

Robert kicks things off with a beautiful re-telling of a 2400-year-old love story from Plato, by way of Aristophanes, about the longing many of us feel for another half to make us whole. This ancient yearning gets us wondering whether the world around us is deeply and fundamentally symmetric, or...not. ...