By Claudia Metzler-Baddeley About 8,000 people in the U.K. are living with Huntington’s disease, a devastating inherited condition that gradually affects movement, thinking and mood. Now, an advanced type of MRI scan could give researchers a way to estimate the cellular damage it causes in living people, which could eventually help show whether treatments are working. New research from my colleagues and I found that the technique can detect abnormalities in the brains of people living with Huntington’s that match those previously identified by examining brain tissue after death. Huntington’s disease is an inherited condition caused by a faulty gene. Its effects usually begin between the ages of 30 and 50. There is currently no cure, although new cell and gene therapies are being developed and tested. One of the main things that happens in Huntington’s is the loss of neuronal cells in the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia deep within the brain. These structures are important for controlling movement and other functions. As cells are lost, the brain tissue in these regions shrinks. We can see this shrinkage using conventional MRI. But a standard brain scan tells us relatively little about what is happening inside the tissue at a cellular level. That’s where our approach comes in. We used a technique called “soma and neurite density imaging”, or Sandi, to analyze diffusion MRI scans. Diffusion MRI detects how water moves through brain tissue. Because that movement is affected by the structures around the water, we can use it to make indirect estimates of properties such as the apparent size and density of cell bodies. This means we can get indirect estimates of the structures within the tissue itself. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Huntingtons; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30396 - Posted: 09.05.2026

By Sarah Thau Sound the alarm! Activating a subset of neurons in the medulla promotes anxiety in mice, a study published in Neuron finds. Anxiety is typically thought of as a set of “complex, social, environmental, biological, neurobiological interactions” involving multiple regions across the brain, says Oliver Robinson, professor of neuroscience and mental health at University College London, who was not involved in this work. So he was “surprised that you can have such dramatic effects by just looking at a single cell type.” The role of medullary neurons in anxiety adds to a growing body of work on anxiety circuitry, says study investigator Carlos Fernández-Peña, assistant professor of neurological sciences at the University of Nebraska. “It was already complex. Now let’s add some more.” Two sets of neurons—C1 and A1—in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM) produce catecholamines that could drive anxiety, but only C1 neurons are activated when mice are stressed, Fernández-Peña says. The challenge, then, was to study only C1 neurons, which are intermingled with A1 neurons, in awake mice to uncover their role in anxiety-like behaviors, he says. He and his colleagues employed two different genetic recombination tools—one called INTRSECT and another called ConVERGD—for the first time, according to study investigator Lindsay Schwarz, associate member of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital faculty, who co-developed the latter tool. This pairing enabled them to make transgenic mice in which they could optogenetically modulate only the C1 neurons and not the A1 cells, using careful genetic logic. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 30376 - Posted: 08.19.2026

Emily Mullin Erin McNulty had been missing for weeks when her mother, Linda, sat down on a chair in her living room, exhausted. Linda had put in her usual seven-day workweek at the antiques shop she runs near Burlington, Vermont. She’d spent her free evenings driving around, trying to track down her daughter. Erin, 45 at the time, had been using methamphetamine for years. Her substance use started in high school—first alcohol, then marijuana, and eventually heroin. Erin’s brother used heroin, too. When Linda found out, she started driving her kids to a methadone clinic three hours away in Massachusetts. The methadone helped, but it made Erin feel tired all the time, so she started using cocaine to stay awake. There were stretches of sobriety—she had her daughter during one of them, in 2008. The family took trips to the Great Escape waterpark in New York and Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. There were also several overdoses and attempts at rehab. Eventually, Erin switched to suboxone and stopped using heroin. But when a friend introduced her to meth, Linda says, “Erin was gone.” Linda turned on the TV and was flipping through the channels when a 60 Minutes segment caught her attention. It was early 2024, and the show focused on a procedure that might help people with substance use disorders. Linda immediately thought of her daughter. The procedure involved beaming ultrasound through the skull to treat the brain. Researchers at West Virginia University were testing it on people with Alzheimer’s disease and addiction. The neurosurgeon behind the procedure, Ali Rezai, was a pioneer in the field of deep brain stimulation, which involves cutting into the skull to implant electrodes that can reach neurons deep in the brain. He was excited by the ability of ultrasound—the imaging tool best known for observing fetal development during pregnancy—to reach into the same brain structures without breaking the skin. There would be no drilling into the skull, no poking or prodding the brain’s delicate tissue. The ultrasound could be delivered in 20 minutes, and patients could go home the same day. © 2026 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Biomechanics
Link ID: 30375 - Posted: 08.15.2026

By Holly Barker Individual structural MRI studies fail to identify reproducible brain signatures for autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions, a new study finds. Brain scans of people with autism, depression and bipolar disorder rarely show consistent differences in cortical thickness or grey matter volume across independent studies, according to the analysis. The study suggests that these structural measures are unlikely to provide reliable biomarkers of those conditions and that different approaches are needed. “The findings are really a wake-up call. We’ve all been operating under the assumption that if we keep doing these studies enough, eventually the noise will wash out and we will converge on some consensus of what the brain changes in a particular disorder are,” says study investigator Alex Fornito, professor of psychology at Monash University. “Our findings suggest if we keep doing that business as usual, that’s not going to happen.” Structural MRI studies have long produced conflicting results. Some have identified greater cortical thickness of select brain regions in people with autism than those without the condition, while others have reported the opposite. Until now, it was unclear whether such discrepancies reflected differences in study design and analysis, or whether structural brain signatures for these conditions do not exist. To address that question, Fornito and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans from thousands of people with neuropsychiatric conditions—including depression, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, autism and bipolar disorder—as well as from people with Alzheimer’s disease. They calculated cortical thickness or grey matter volume using the same analysis pipeline across all datasets and then compared how consistently brain changes were reproduced between independent study sites. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 30368 - Posted: 08.12.2026

By Jake Currie No one knows what causes Alzheimer’s disease. There are plenty of risk factors associated with the neurodegenerative disease, like inflammation, smoking, and genetics, but so far no single culprit has emerged. A new study published in Translational Psychiatry, however, investigated the link between Alzheimer’s and another risk factor, depression, leading to some surprising results. Neuroscientists led by a team from the University of Southern California analyzed high-resolution MRI scans from more than 2,000 healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 90. Around a third of them (630) had been diagnosed with depression, and these subjects showed a significant decrease in volume in their hippocampus. The entire hippocampus wasn’t affected, though, just a smaller subfield responsible for retrieving memories, reconstructing memories from partial information, and distinguishing between similar experiences. “This study shows why it’s important to look beyond the total size of the hippocampus,” study co-author Meredith N. Braskie said in a statement. “Depression wasn’t related to smaller volume throughout the entire region. The association was concentrated in a particular set of subfields, giving us a more precise picture of how depression may relate to brain health during aging.” © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30360 - Posted: 08.08.2026

BY Christie Wilcox The vagus nerve snakes through the human body like an elaborate highway system, transmitting signals from the brain to the heart, lungs, and gastrointestinal system and back. But despite its critical role in regulating breathing, heart rate, and digestion, researchers have long struggled to map its anatomical structure—until now. Scientists have created the first comprehensive map of the human vagus nerve, tracing thousands of individual nerve fibers stretching from the lower brain stem to all major organs. The map—announced last week and detailed in a data set released earlier this year—might help scientists and doctors more precisely stimulate the nerve as a potential treatment for conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, and inflammatory diseases. Some existing therapies stimulate the vagus nerve with electrodes implanted in the chest or neck sending signals that can suppress seizure activity in the brain, for example, or blunt pain. But the vagus nerve is a staggeringly intricate network: After forking into a main left and right branch, it shoots out finer branches made up of fascicles—small bundles of nerve fibers—that project to organs throughout the body. That complexity makes it hard to isolate and target specific nerve fibers or to understand the effects of stimulating at a given point. “We place an electrode on the vagus nerve, and things happen. But why do these things happen in this certain way?” asks Stavros Zanos, the physician-scientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research who led the mapping project. “We just had no idea, and we looked at the literature, and it just wasn’t there.” To build a comprehensive map of the nerve structures, Zanos and his colleagues analyzed 30 sets of left and right vagus nerves dissected from 30 human cadavers. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Stress
Link ID: 30358 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Emily Singer It all started at the bar at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting more than 10 years ago. A scientist pulled out his iPad and began showing Tyler Sloan, then a neuroscience graduate student, a 3D video that flew through the bundled nerve fibers of the spinal cord in a tissue-cleared embryo. “My first thought when I saw that was that we need to put this on a planetarium dome,” Sloan says. The video reflected a turning point in microscopy imaging, when techniques such as Clarity, which enables high-resolution imaging of intact tissue, made it possible to image relatively large volumes of the brain and illustrate the nervous system’s complexity in all its glory. Inspired by the public engagement he saw at astronomy screenings at planetariums, Sloan wanted to employ these kinds of videos to kindle the same sense of awe toward the brain. He began learning 3D animation, eventually leaving academia and launching his own company to create sophisticated visualizations for scientists. But, he says, it was all in service of his goal to make an immersive brain movie for the public. More than a decade after the idea took root, the project has finally borne fruit: Sloan’s planetarium film premiered during the weeklong BrainFest event in Seattle in March. Other showings are in the works, including at Neuroscience Academy Denmark’s annual meeting in November. Sloan says he plans to make the film freely available and hopes it will eventually be shown at planetariums around the world. Tyler Sloan: We can do a better job of inspiring people with a sense of awe. I went to a national park in Canada with an observatory over spring break with my family. Their outreach is really elaborate; they have an emcee and what they call the cosmic jockey, the technician operating the computer in the background and throwing up images throughout the entire presentation. I was amazed at the level of questions coming from school-aged kids. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 30345 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Jon Hamilton One of the world's top centers for brain science is taking a huge gamble on a tiny, transparent fish. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus near Washington, D.C., has announced an effort to use artificial intelligence and an unusual fish called Danionella to understand how the brain controls complex behaviors like social interaction. "It's a big, risky bet," says Gerry Rubin, Janelia's founding executive director and head of biology. "But that's what makes it interesting." Janelia plans to triple the space dedicated to fish to 6,000 square feet, which will make room for thousands of new tanks. Leaders expect that the number of scientists working on Danionella is likely to rise from about 10 to 100 or more. The payoff, they say, will be worth it — because by watching an entire fish brain function in real time, researchers at Janelia hope to learn about exactly how the brain drives behavior in other species, including humans. "We all evolved from fish, and our brains share many features of the brains of fish," says Nelson Spruston, Janelia's executive director. The brain as a black box © 2026 npr

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30282 - Posted: 06.17.2026

By Natalia Mesa IQ is one of the most-studied traits in brain imaging studies. And yet it has a weaker relationship with brain structure and function in children than socioeconomic status does, according to a study published today in Science. The apparent link between IQ and brain differences largely disappears once socioeconomic status is controlled for, the findings suggest. The results point to the importance of factoring in socioeconomic status in analyses of brain imaging datasets, the researchers say. “If you’re not properly taking into account [socioeconomic status]” in brain imaging experiments, “you’re going to fool yourself,” says study investigator Nico Dosenbach, professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dosenbach and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans and behavioral data from roughly 12,000 children aged 9 to 10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, looking for correlations between measures of brain structure and function and 649 psychological, health, social and environmental factors. Socioeconomic variables—such as household income and where the child lives—were the most strongly associated with functional connectivity and cortical thickness. Differences in socioeconomics account for 16 percent of the variance in functional connectivity across the participants, the study found, which is among “the largest effects that are seen in these kinds of studies,” says Russ Poldrack, professor of psychology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. Socioeconomic status accounted for roughly 13 percent of the variance in cortical thickness. Sleep and screen time are also strongly linked to these brain features, although not as strongly as socioeconomics. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 30279 - Posted: 06.13.2026

By Holly Barker Neurons in the locus coeruleus, which provides norepinephrine to the rest of the brain and spinal cord, are more spatially and functionally diverse than previously thought, a new preprint finds. The work reveals how such a small structure located deep in the brainstem can influence a range of functions in multiple brain regions. Locus coeruleus neurons show gene expression variations that track with differences in the cells’ shape and projection targets, the study found. And neurons that occupy opposite ends of the structure respond differently to the rewards mice receive during a learning task, suggesting that the neurons facilitate learning in distinct ways. “This is the bread-and-butter work that the locus coeruleus field needed,” says Nelson Totah, associate professor of neurophysiology and pharmacology at the University of Helsinki, who was not involved in the study. “What they did here was not ask flashy questions [but] answer fundamental questions about this evolutionarily ancient nucleus, so I’m really glad to see this work.” The locus coeruleus—which translates from Latin to “blue spot”—is named for the blue pigmented cells that synthesize norepinephrine. The structure was long thought to consist of homogeneous neurons that secrete norepinephrine in synchrony. But over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the region is structurally and functionally heterogeneous: It has two distinct neuronal subtypes that fire asynchronously and drive opposite behaviors in rats, according to papers published in 2018 and 2017, respectively. The new findings suggest that the structure’s neurons are even more diverse and follow a precise organizational pattern: From one end of the region to the other, neurons show a spatial gradient in gene expression differences that map onto variations in the cells’ morphology, electrical activity and target regions, the new study found. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30257 - Posted: 05.27.2026

Xiaoying You Chinese companies are racing to develop and deploy artificial-intelligence powered brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that can help people to move, speak and control devices. BCIs, which link a person’s brain to an external device or a computer using sensors placed around or inside the head, have been used in people who are paralysed and those with neurodegenerative diseases over the past decade. In the past few years, companies, mostly in China and the United States, have added large language models to their brain devices. This enables scientists to decode brain activity more accurately than can be achieved using conventional signal-processing and data-analysing technologies, says Li Haifeng, a neuro-computing scientist at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. In China, trials in small numbers of people are underway and some AI-powered brain devices will soon be sold to the public. First trials in people NeuroXess in Shanghai is one company in China that has run small clinical trials, including on their AI-powered brain implant can assist people with paralysis. The implant is placed in a shallow recess in the skull, and its sensors are fitted on the brain’s outer layer, called the cerebral cortex. The system is then connected by wire to a data transmitter that doubles as a battery, which is embedded in the recipient’s chest. In a trial in October, a 28-year-old man with a spinal cord injury who was fitted with the brain implant was able to control appliances by moving a computer cursor with his thoughts to turn them on and off using an app. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Robotics; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30249 - Posted: 05.20.2026

Katherine Bourzac Scientists have discovered that the unsung brain cells called astrocytes form extensive networks in the mouse brain1 — networks similar in some respects to the brain circuits formed by the more celebrated brain cells called neurons. The researchers compiled a whole-brain, 3D map of astrocyte networks, which the authors say is the first of its kind. It , shows that webs of the cells connect far-flung regions of the brain, allowing the cells to exchange molecules with each other over long distances. The ‘silent’ brain cells that shape our behaviour, memory and health “It’s a secret subway system we didn’t know was there,” says Shane Liddelow, a neuroscientist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City and a co-author of a paper published today in Nature describing the work. “This opens up a whole new avenue of investigation.” Astrocyte networks can bridge the brain’s hemispheres, and they display plasticity, reshaping their connections in response to sensory deprivation, the team found. The work is “a fundamentally important advance in our understanding of nervous system structure”, says David Lyons, a neurobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who was not involved with the research. He adds that so far, this new evidence of complex astrocyte networks raises more questions than it answers. “Clearly we are some way from understanding what the functional relevance and role of such [networks] is, but there are a myriad of possibilities.” © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Glia; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30218 - Posted: 04.26.2026

By Nora Bradford If you were to imagine a waterfall, a misty cascade into an azure pool surrounded by towering trees might come to mind. That mental vision might also be accompanied by the imagined roar of water splashing down. But when it comes to our brains, does imagining a waterfall activate different areas compared with seeing or hearing one in real life? For both sounds and sights, the overlap between imagination and perception appears not in brain areas linked to a single sense, but in high-level areas that accept multiple types of sensory inputs, researchers report March 31 in Neuron. For years, cognitive neuroscientist Rodrigo Braga has been working to determine whether the human brain is processing mental imagery through hearing and other senses or whether something else is at play. “When I was a teenager, I remember the first time realizing that there’s like a voice I can hear in my head and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really strange’,” says Braga, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In this study, he and his colleagues prompted eight participants to imagine scenes, faces, someone else speaking, internal monologues and sounds while in an MRI scanner. The small number of individuals allowed the researchers to collect hours of MRI data to create individualized brain maps rather than averaging across individuals. This technique allowed the team to reliably find individual variation in brain activity during imagination. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 30214 - Posted: 04.26.2026

By Angie Voyles Askham When Shan Siddiqi arrived in Australia in February to speak at the 2026 Noosa Brain Workshop, he was still thinking about a paper published in Nature Neuroscience three weeks prior. The work had criticized lesion network mapping (LNM), a neuroimaging method that Siddiqi uses as the basis for much of his work. LNM uses the location of brain lesions in various health conditions to infer information about networks of brain activity altered in those conditions. But the January paper claimed the approach produces biased results, and points to largely the same brain networks no matter the condition. After reading the full paper, however, Siddiqi, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, decided the authors’ criticism was toothless—it highlighted issues that he and his colleagues were aware of, and had already developed methods to address. Yet to his dismay, in the following days and weeks the criticism kept coming, both on social media and in news articles, including one by The Transmitter. The issue hung over the conference, too. During a social event on the first night of the Noosa meeting, other attendees asked Siddiqi, as a leading proponent of the method, for his thoughts, and he decided he needed to address the criticism in his talk the following day. The next afternoon, he told the audience of senior neuroimaging researchers that he took the challenge raised in the paper seriously, and said it had caused him and his co-author Michael D. Fox to reanalyze their data in collaboration with neuroimaging statisticians. He then presented the two competing hypotheses to the audience—LNM findings are disease specific versus LNM is mathematically flawed—and explained how he and Fox tested both with real data. The results seemed to validate LNM, Siddiqi said, leading him to conclude that the critique rested on incorrect assumptions about how the method is implemented. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 30205 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Claudia López Lloreda A previously unrecognized population of fibroblasts seals off the base of the choroid plexus—the network of blood vessels and cerebrospinal-fluid-producing epithelial cells that line the ventricles—from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the rest of the brain, a new study in mice shows. The newly identified barrier provides an added layer of protection that is distinct from the well-known blood-brain barrier and the one that the epithelial cells form between the blood and the CSF. The findings help settle a long-standing debate about whether there was a blind spot in the choroid plexus that gave the periphery access into the brain, says Britta Engelhardt, professor of immunobiology at the University of Bern, who was not involved in the work. “Some [scientists] speculated that there is a leak, like an opening, a secret window into the brain, and others said, ‘No, there must be a barrier that we have overlooked.’ And it’s very obvious now.” Fibroblasts at the base of the choroid plexus, connected by adherens and tight junction proteins, cluster together around blood vessels and form a sealed barrier in mice, the researchers found. This structure represents a crucial component of compartmentalization in the choroid plexus, Engelhardt says. The cells were also present in human postmortem brain samples. Similar to other barriers, the seal becomes leaky in response to inflammation triggered by lipopolysaccharide, a component of the bacterial cell wall, and it may coordinate immune cell crossing from the blood into the brain, the study also showed. The work was published in February in Nature Neuroscience. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30190 - Posted: 04.04.2026

By Jennie Erin Smith In 2017, physicist Nir Grossman made a discovery that promised a versatile new way to manipulate the living brain. Working in mice, he and his collaborators applied two high-frequency electrical currents to the skull. At the spot in the rodents’ brains where the currents collided, the electric field altered neural activity. Other noninvasive methods typically reach no further than the cortex, the brain’s outer layer. The new approach, called temporal interference (TI) stimulation, offered access to deep-brain areas previously only targetable with surgery. Neuroscientists were quick to see TI’s potential for studying the brain and treating its disorders, and they are now testing it in a variety of human trials. Although the studies are still small and many have not been replicated, they hint that TI may have potential to ease epilepsy symptoms, help stroke patients recover movement, boost memory in people with Alzheimer’s disease, and treat psychiatric conditions. Many say TI—which uses two pairs of head-mounted electrodes linked to portable current generators—is nimbler and likely safer than transcranial focused ultrasound, another emerging technology that can modulate deep-brain regions without surgery. And because TI equipment is inexpensive and widely available, it’s been easy for labs to try out. “What [TI] should be is an open-source therapy,” says physicist and epilepsy researcher Adam Williamson of St. Anne’s University Hospital. This year, he and his colleagues showed in a pilot study of people with epilepsy that TI stimulation to the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure that is often the source of hard-to-treat seizures, could both suppress spikes of abnormal brain activity and improve participants’ sleep. His group and another at Duke University are collaborating on a larger clinical trial of the approach. In TI, two high-frequency electrical currents applied to the brain meet or interfere to form a low-frequency focal area, or “envelope,” that can boost or suppress the rate of neurons’ electrical signaling. “It’s a powerful way to entrain neuronal activity,” says Melanie Boly, an epilepsy researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 30165 - Posted: 03.19.2026

Ian Sample Science editor Scientists have reconstructed short movies from the brain activity of mice that watched videos for a project that aspires to lift the veil on how animals perceive the world. The brief movie clips are grainy and pixellated, but provide a glimpse of how mice processed footage that featured people taking part in various sports from gymnastics to horse riding and wrestling. The work is in its infancy, but as technology advances, scientists hope to eavesdrop on a richer suite of animal perceptions and ultimately gain fresh insights into their experiences and how brains more broadly respond to their surroundings. “The nice thing with humans is you can just ask someone, what did you dream about? What did you see? What are you hallucinating?” said Dr Joel Bauer at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London. “But we don’t have that access with animals in the same way.” Central to the work was an artificial intelligence program that won a recent scientific competition to predict how electrical activity in the visual cortex of the mouse brain changes depending on what the animals are seeing. The visual cortex receives raw input from the retina and turns it into a coherent view of the world. To reconstruct what mice were watching, the scientists first used an infrared laser to record how neurons were firing in the visual cortex as the rodents watched 10-second-long movie clips. They then fed blank video data into the AI program and steadily altered the imagery until the AI predicted the same patterns of brain activity as those seen in the mice. Details are published in the journal eLife. Mice have poor eyesight compared with humans, so the reconstructed videos may never be as clear as the originals. But at a rough guess, Bauer suspects scientists could make the footage about seven times sharper than it is at present. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Vision; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30157 - Posted: 03.11.2026

By Jake Currie Struggling to remember a forgotten memory is an all-too-common frustration—one that unfortunately becomes more common as we age. We realize that there’s something we can’t recall, but we simply can’t raise it from the depths of our brains. So where did it go? New research published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests these memories are still lurking in our minds, even though we think they’re long gone. Subscribe to skip ads Featured Video Psychologists from the University of Nottingham led by Benjamin Griffiths strapped participants into a magnetoencephalography machine to measure the magnetic fields surrounding the electrical activity in their brains. Participants were asked to vividly associate a short video clip with a word, and when they were later shown that word, they were asked to recall the video clip while psychologists monitored the magnetic activity of their brains. They found that the brain reactivated memories whether they were consciously recalled or not, meaning the memories were there. When memories were successfully recalled, the reactivated memory signal fluctuated rhythmically in the alpha band. Alpha brain waves, research has shown, are associated with the memorization of visual information, but it was the rhythmicity of the waves that proved key to conscious recall. “What we showed is that even when the brain can reactivate the right memory, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll become aware of it,” Griffiths explained. “Instead, what seems to matter is that the memory rhythmically pulses so that it can be detected above and beyond other neural activity.”

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30151 - Posted: 03.07.2026

By Justin O’Hare For decades, two complementary but often siloed approaches have guided neuroscience: cellular neuroscience, which seeks to understand how individual neurons work; and systems neuroscience, which aims to uncover how networks of neurons coordinate to produce thoughts, movements and behaviors. One studies the tree; the other studies the forest. Each approach has produced tremendous advances. For instance, cellular neuroscientists have revealed how ion channels shape the electrical language of the brain, how synapses strengthen or weaken with experience and how gene expression governs neuronal function. Meanwhile, systems neuroscientists have mapped entire circuits, recorded the activity of tens of thousands of neurons during behavior and identified patterns of activity that correlate with memory, decision-making and emotion. But for all these advances, a question lingers: Are we actually any closer to understanding how the brain works? The jaw-dropping datasets produced by systems-level studies are seldom reconciled with biology, and the exquisite detail uncovered by cellular-level studies is rarely extrapolated from circuits to behavior. These disconnects don’t reflect failures of either approach. Rather, they reflect the vast intellectual and material resources that each requires. Nevertheless, the brain is a multiscale organ. It is organized across multiple hierarchical levels operating in concert, not in parallel. To unravel the brain’s deepest complexities, we need to bridge cellular and systems neuroscience. Because of recent technological advances in high-density electrical probes, genetically encoded fluorescent sensors, multiphoton imaging and high-performance computing, we are better suited to do this now than ever before. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30140 - Posted: 02.28.2026

By Lauren Schneider Microglia may be a key mediator between maternal immune activation and a pup’s memory of contextual fear conditioning in early infancy, a new mouse study reports. The findings sharpen the picture of memory formation in early life, but the study’s approach to microglia has raised questions. That scrutiny comes as scientists reevaluate concepts such as synaptic pruning, through which microglia may shape neuronal circuits in early life and beyond. Humans and rodents are unable to recall some of the earliest memories formed after birth. This period of infantile amnesia offers researchers a window to test conditions that may alter the survival of engrams, the changes in the brain tied to memory formation. “Development is an experiment that nature does for you,” says study investigator Tomás Ryan, professor in neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. Activation of the immune system during pregnancy in mice leads to autism-like behaviors in their pups and reduces infantile amnesia, according to a previous study by Ryan’s team. Blocking microglial activity allows some infantile memories to persist in mice, Ryan and his colleagues report in the new paper, published 20 January in PLOS Biology. Administering minocycline in water daily starting one day before foot-shock conditioning at postnatal day 17 led to greater fear memory at postnatal day 25, after the typical onset of infantile amnesia. This recall was accompanied by a reactivation of associated engrams in the basolateral amygdala and central amygdalar nucleus. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Glia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30122 - Posted: 02.14.2026