"It has to be the long-range connections," David Alexander insisted, pointing at the spatial power spectra sprawled across his screen. Laura Dugué wasn't so sure - or rather, she wanted the math to be bulletproof before anyone started making claims about what dominates cortical communication. The...
People who can instantly spot a camouflaged moth on tree bark or pick out a friend's face in a packed stadium have something happening deep in their visual cortex that people who struggle with those tasks don't: tighter, more coordinated bursts of electrical chatter between neurons firing at...
A 58-year-old former marathon runner - let's call her Maria - sat in her oncologist's office staring at a scan of her lungs. Stage II adenocarcinoma. The tumor was small, caught early, theoretically beatable. But her immune system, a perfectly functional army of cancer-killing cells, was barely...
Every brain hums with its own symphony - billions of neurons firing in rhythms, keeping tempo with a molecular beat that scientists are only beginning to read as sheet music. But what happens when that orchestra starts losing musicians, when the brass section forgets its cue, and the percussion...
Of all the unsolved puzzles in neuroscience, here's one that's been hiding in plain sight: why do older adults fare so much worse after traumatic brain injury? We're not talking a little worse. Adults over 65 account for nearly 40% of all TBI-related deaths in the United States, and the...
There is something about the late afternoon light in April - that peculiar golden hour when the day can't quite decide whether to linger - that reminds one of adolescence itself: caught between two states, committed to neither. It is during these in-between hours that the brain does some of its...
Step 1: You're sitting at your desk, staring at a spreadsheet. Step 2: Your eyes are open, your coffee is warm, and by every measurable standard you are awake. Step 3: Your brain quietly slips into a dream.
People who study monkeys in a lab see animals pressing buttons and staring at screens, their heads bolted in place, performing the same task a thousand times like furry little factory workers. People who study monkeys in the wild see grooming, fighting, flirting, scheming, and the kind of social...
Astrocytes - the brain's most abundant glial cells - have been secretly running an immune surveillance programme under chronic inflammatory conditions, presenting neuronal debris to the immune system like evidence at a trial. Let me explain how we got here.
Tucked deep inside your temporal lobe, just medial to the amygdala and roughly behind your ears, sits the hippocampus - a curled, seahorse-shaped structure that has been the subject of more PhD dissertations than probably any other chunk of neural tissue. It's the brain's rapid-fire note-taker,...
Buried deep in a recent cross-species brain study is a finding that might rewrite how we think about what makes the human brain, well, human: chunks of ancient virus DNA - remnants of infections that hit our ancestors millions of years ago - appear to have been quietly co-opted into controlling...
There's a word in Japanese - kintsugi - that has no English translation. It refers to the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making the repaired object more beautiful than the original. It's a nice metaphor for resilience, but neuroscience doesn't usually deal in metaphors. Except,...
The shortest version of this story: a protein better known for causing eye disease is secretly leaking glutamate in your prefrontal cortex, and that leak might be why chronic pain drags anxiety along for the ride. The interesting version takes a bit longer.
Zoom in on a slice of injured brain tissue under a microscope, and you'll spot them: microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, swollen and bristling with activity, their delicate branching arms retracted into stubby, aggressive shapes. They look like they're ready for a fight. The problem? The...
The paper is called "Higher drinking frequency corresponds to lower synaptic density in people with alcohol use disorder," which, translated from Academic to English, means: the more often you drink, the fewer connections your brain cells have left to work with. Not exactly the tagline your local...
For years, scientists were looking in the wrong part of the brain. They had a hormone - FGF21 - that clearly told the brain "we're running low on protein, do something about it." They had a list of suspect brain regions, all sitting pretty in the hypothalamus, that classic overachiever of neural...
Most cells, when the floor drops out from under them, just... give up. Not the retinal pigment epithelium. When a genetic mutation rips open a gap between the RPE and the photoreceptors it's supposed to be feeding, these unassuming cells do something nobody predicted: they grow long, stretchy arms...
Quick - tell me which of these two patterns is brighter. No, faster. FASTER.
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your brain has been accumulating sticky protein clumps for possibly decades, and the newest drug designed to clean them up might cause its own brand of trouble - especially if you lost the genetic lottery in one very specific way.
What if the cells we've been calling "support staff" in the brain were actually holding the whole operation together - and their slow, silent breakdown is what tips the balance toward Parkinson's disease?
