All articles tagged with #neuroscience
Researchers are exploring interoception, the body's ability to sense internal signals, as a potential sixth sense that helps regulate mood and mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and eating disorders, with findings noting sex differences and links to mood stability and treatment potential, though the field remains debated.
Neurologist Dr. Verghese’s research on “super movers”—80-year-olds who walk as fast as much younger adults—shows about a 50% lower risk of cognitive impairment and a younger biological age. Brisk walking at roughly 3 mph for at least 30 minutes daily (even split up) is linked to better memory and mood and lower rates of heart disease, depression, and hearing loss, though brain tissue wear can be similar to slower walkers; the takeaway is to maintain a brisk pace to support brain health with aging.
University of Tokyo researchers identify a hippocampus–amygdala circuit that binds the memory of a familiar mouse to fear, causing avoidance after aggressive encounters; using optogenetics they could strengthen or erase this aversion, with the nucleus accumbens helping translate memory and fear into avoidance. While demonstrated in mice, the findings offer clues about how social memory and negative emotions interact, with potential relevance for anxiety and depression in humans.
AI could mass-produce high-quality science—new analyses, data, figures, and conclusions—at low cost, benefiting the public and patients, but it will also create challenges in separating quality work from low-quality output. Reliability will hinge on new practices like open data, preregistration, and robust validation. Humans will still guide which questions to pursue, refine concepts, design and interpret experiments, and curate trustworthy results. The shift may resemble the Industrial Revolution: some jobs vanish while new roles emerge, with AI-enabled data integration and personalized review accelerating discoveries while reshaping careers in science.
Spaceflight triggers a quiet but lasting reweighting of the brain’s senses: the vestibular system in the inner ear becomes unreliable in microgravity, so the visual cortex takes on more of the work for orientation and balance. MRI scans show the brain shifting upward, ventricles expanding, and SANS-related changes, with some effects persisting for months after return. The brain’s connections reorganize to rely on vision, a reconfiguration that generally normalizes on Earth but can yield lingering balance and dual-tasking challenges for some astronauts. These findings matter for long-duration missions, highlighting both brain plasticity and the rehab challenges after deep-space travel.
New research shows that human cortical neurons are exceptionally powerful computing units, thanks to dense, branching dendritic trees and unique electrical properties. Using AI to mimic a single neuron’s input-output behavior, scientists found its processing depth rivals a deep neural network, challenging the view that intelligence scales mainly with brain size. The work introduces a Functional Complexity Index to quantify neuronal computation and offers a blueprint for brain-inspired AI built from intrinsically deep biological units.
A Baycrest-led study found that experienced birders have denser, more organized brain tissue in attention and visual-perception regions, and those same regions show stronger activation when they view unfamiliar bird species, suggesting that expertise reshapes brain structure to support efficient, template-free recognition across the lifespan.
Scientists show the human olfactory bulb generates a theta rhythm synchronized to a single sniff, with gamma bursts timing odor responses. In six volunteers, deliberate sniffs reset the rhythm to a consistent phase and larger breaths amplified the theta waves, while passive breathing did not evoke the rhythm. Published in Science Advances, the study suggests a shared, sniff-driven timing mechanism in the smell system with potential implications for early detection of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autism.
A study presented at a neuroscience conference reports that speaking more languages is associated with younger-appearing brains. Using magnetoencephalography and AI to estimate brain age, researchers analyzed 728 participants and a second group of 144, finding that each additional language and earlier second-language acquisition correlate with a smaller brain-age, up to about 13 years younger for those fluent in four languages. While the study accounted for age, sex and education, experts caution that lifestyle and other factors could influence the results, though the findings support language-learning as a potential strategy for maintaining brain health.
A two-year, randomized trial in 365 older adults at elevated Alzheimer’s risk found that 2,000 mg/day DHA reaches the brain but does not improve memory or slow brain atrophy versus placebo, even among APOE ε4 carriers. Potential reasons include DHA metabolism in the brain and inflammation from cardiovascular risk factors; the relatively young, lightly affected cohort and high dropout limit generalizability. The study reinforces that lifestyle factors (regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and a balanced diet) remain the best available dementia risk-reduction strategy while future work explores DHA metabolism, biomarkers, and personalized approaches.
A study of 635 adults using fMRI found that the age at which abuse occurs matters for later emotion processing: abuse before age 13 is linked to heightened hippocampal activity during rapid, non-conscious emotion processing, while abuse in adolescence (13–18) is linked to heightened amygdala activity during conscious emotion processing. These patterns persisted across various mental health diagnoses and healthy controls, suggesting the timing of adversity leaves lasting neural marks and could guide targeted interventions, though retrospective reporting and cross-sectional design limit conclusions.
Researchers at the University of Utah report that Arc, a brain protein important for neuron signaling, also helps package and transmit the toxic tau protein between brain cells in Alzheimer’s models. In mice lacking Arc, neuron-to-neuron tau transmission dropped significantly, suggesting Arc could be a new target to slow disease progression. However, Arc is also vital for learning and memory, so therapies would need to block tau transport without disrupting Arc’s normal function. Most findings come from mouse studies, and it remains unclear how well this translates to humans.
A rat study found that a single psilocybin dose (1 mg/kg, given intraperitoneally) reduced the rats’ preference for larger rewards 48 hours after administration, by increasing activity of parvalbumin inhibitory interneurons wrapped in perineuronal nets in the medial prefrontal cortex. This linked change in brain circuitry suggests psilocybin may dampen incentive motivation and alter reward processing, offering insight into potential mechanisms for treating substance-use disorders. Results are preliminary and limited to male rats, with no impairment to attention or basic motor skills observed.
A Columbia Engineering team built biologically constrained recurrent neural networks and showed that an inhibition-on-inhibition circuit enables top-down control to reshape early visual processing based on task rules; weakening these connections collapses flexible switching, and live mouse cortex recordings validate the model's predictions, suggesting early sensory areas are dynamic workspaces and pointing to energy-efficient AI designs that mimic human cognitive flexibility.
A Brain Medicine Perspective argues sleep functions as a system-level resilience mechanism that partitions NREM and REM phases to renormalize neural networks, prevent runaway instability, and support continual learning in artificial systems, with potential implications for disorders and recovery after disruption.