Mind Hacks has posted the 57th edition of the mind/brain Encephalon carnival. Vaughan Bell is now safely installed in Medellin, Colombia, so is it any surprise that the lead-in piece to this Encephalon is about a Colombian? (Or that I highlight that fact? Colombia is still the best country I’ve ever visited for traveling… And the people. Well, I got married there, didn’t I?)

So Rodolfo Llinas, neuroscientist born in Bogota with an MD degree from the same university my wife attended, is featured over at Channel N. Here’s the video and the transcript. You can also check out the opening to his book I of the Vortex. In the end, along with Patricia Churchland, co-editor of their book The Mind-Brain Continuum, he is a fairly hard-core neuroscientist – as he says in the video, “everything we do is a product of our brain.” But this video is quite revealing about his own genesis as a scholar and person, starting with family in Colombia and a love for science.

As we have come to expect from Mind Hacks and Encephalon more generally, there is a lot of great featured stuff. Gestures to communicate, hypothesis testing, long-term potentiation, the childhood origins of our personality, and more…. So go check out Encephalon #57.