Neuroscience
Latest significant advancements in neuroscience research. Reporting on the far-reaching impacts of neuroscience on society and humanity.
Scientists Jump-Started Consciousness in Monkeys by Pinpointing This Brain Region
In 1991, a devastating car crash left 32-year-old Munira Abdulla with severe brain injuries and in a deep coma. Doctors thought she had no chance of recovery. Yet her story blew up when, miraculously,...
Neuromodulation Is the Secret Sauce for This Adaptive, Fast-Learning AI
As obstinate and frustrating as we are sometimes, humans in general are pretty flexible when it comes to learning—especially compared to AI.
Our ability to adapt is deeply rooted within our brain’s chemical base code....
Blind Woman Sees With New Implant, Plays Video Game Sent Straight to Her Brain
It’s been over a decade since artificial retinas first began helping the blind see. But for many people, whose blindness originates beyond the retina, the technology falls short. Which is why new research out...
Decoding the Brain Goes Global With the International Brain Initiative
Few times in history has mankind ever united to solve a single goal. Even the ultimate moonshot in history—putting a man on the moon—was driven by international competition rather than unification.
So it’s perhaps fitting...
The Brain Predicts Reward Like an AI, Says New DeepMind Research
The idea of reinforcement learning—or learning based on reward—has been around for so long it’s easy to forget we don’t really know how it works.
If DeepMind’s new bombshell paper in Nature is any indication,...
Scientists Discovered ‘Mini-Computers’ in Human Neurons—and That’s Great News for AI
With just their input cables, human neurons can perform difficult logic calculations previously only seen in entire neural networks. To restate: human neurons are far more powerful devices than originally thought. And if deep...
These Breakthroughs Made the 2010s the Decade of the Brain
I rarely use the words transformative or breakthrough for neuroscience findings. The brain is complex, noisy, chaotic, and often unpredictable. One intriguing result under one condition may soon fail for a majority of others....
This Year’s 4 Most Mind-Boggling Stories About the Brain
2019 was nuts for neuroscience. I said this last year too, but that’s the nature of accelerating technologies: the advances just keep coming.
There’re the theoretical showdowns: a mano a mano battle of where consciousness...
First-Ever Artificial Neuron Could Let Us Repair Brain Injuries with Silicon
The merging of man and machine is a staple of sci-fi and at the heart of the philosophy of transhumanism. But interfacing our brains with computers has proven incredibly hard, despite the fact that...
The Origin of Consciousness in the Brain Is About to Be Tested
Here’s something you don’t hear every day: two theories of consciousness are about to face off in the scientific fight of the century.
Backed by top neuroscientist theorists of today, including Christof Koch, head of...
This Strange Rule Is What Makes the Human Brain So Powerful
Run a supercomputer every second of every day, and eventually its storage will fill up, its speed decrease, and its components burn out.
Yet our brains run with astonishing efficacy nearly every moment of our...
How Old Is Your Brain? This AI Can Tell You
Delaying “brain age” may sound like the latest quick-fix gimmick on a late-night infomercial, but the science underlying the concept is very real.
Rather than reflecting the average functional state of your chronological age, brain...
Deep Learning Networks Can’t Generalize—But They’re Learning From the Brain
“Bias” in AI is often treated as a dirty word. But to Dr. Andreas Tolias at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, bias may also be the solution to smarter, more human-like...
This Light-based Nervous System Helps Robots ‘Feel’
Last night, way past midnight, I stumbled onto my porch blindly grasping for my keys after a hellish day of international travel. Lights were low, I was half-asleep, yet my hand grabbed the keychain,...
New Hybrid Brain Map Reveals How Neurons Connect
Projects that map the billions of connections within entire brains have always had a tinge of grandiosity. Yet to connectomists, these projects aren’t just the key to cracking the brain’s ultimate mysteries. Understanding how...
Lab-Grown Minibrains Show Activity Similar to Babies’ Brains
Neurons are a collective bunch. Although each neuron receives, processes, and passes on information individually, the electrical spikes only make sense when melded together in waves of oscillating activity. Like an orchestra, the notes...
A Brief Tour Through the Wild West of Neural Interfaces
To most of us, zapping neurons with electricity to artificially “incept” memories, sensation, and movement still sounds crazy. But in some brain labs, that technology is beginning to feel old school. As a new...
Three Invaluable Ways AI and Neuroscience Are Driving Each Other Forward
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis once pointed to the human brain as a paramount inspiration for building AI with human-like intelligence. He’s not the only one. The meteoric success of deep learning showcases how insights from...
Moving Beyond Mind-Controlled Limbs to Prosthetics That Can Actually ‘Feel’
Brain-machine interface enthusiasts often gush about “closing the loop.” It’s for good reason. On the implant level, it means engineering smarter probes that only activate when they detect faulty electrical signals in brain circuits....
Exploring the Great Mysteries of Consciousness and Free Will With Annaka Harris
For thousands of years, humankind has been plagued by to two essential questions: Why do I have this unique voice inside my head? And am I in control of it or am I simply...
How Scientists Used Light to Incept Sensations and Memories in Mice
Last week, Elon Musk’s mysterious Neuralink finally revealed their master plan after two years of silence: to build high bandwidth, immune resistant, thread-like brain-machine interfaces that can be robotically implanted into the brain.
In theory,...
The First Complete Brain Wiring Diagram of Any Species Is Here
For a humble, microscopic worm with only 302 neurons, C. elegans has had a lot of firsts. It was the first multicellular animal to have its whole genome sequenced. It was also the spark...
Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness?
There’s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains.
If you, like many scientists, subscribe to this theory,...
Scientists Can Now Clone Brain Organoids. Here’s Why That Matters
An army of free-floating minibrain clones are heading your way!
No, that’s not the premise of a classic sci-fi brain-in-jars blockbuster. Rather, a team at Harvard has figured out a way to “clone” brain organoids,...
How Deep Learning Is Transforming Brain Mapping
Thanks to deep learning, the tricky business of making brain atlases just got a lot easier.
Brain maps are all the rage these days. From rainbow-colored dots that highlight neurons or gene expression across the...
DARPA’s New Project Is Investing Millions in Brain-Machine Interface Tech
When Elon Musk and DARPA both hop aboard the cyborg hypetrain, you know brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are about to achieve the impossible.
BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with...
The Crucial Role of Brain Simulation in Future Neuroscience
“Do we have a chance of ever understanding brain function without brain simulations?” So asked the Human Brain Project (HBP), the brainchild of Henry Markram, in a new paper in the prestigious journal Neuron.
The...
How Two Paralyzed Patients Walked Again Without Surgery
Just a decade ago, the Walk Again Project was a blue sky, Hail Mary moonshot at total neural rehab for those paralyzed.
The project, a collaboration among fearless neuroengineers, has the lofty goal of giving...
How Researchers Used AI to Better Understand Biological Vision
A few years back, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis famously prophesized that AI and neuroscience will positively feed into each other in a “virtuous circle.” If realized, this would fundamentally expand our insight into intelligence, both...
Scientists Created a ‘Neural Decoder’ That Translates Brain Activity Into Speech
The idea of a mind-reading machine might freak a lot of people out, but a new device that can transform brain activity into speech could be the first step towards a lifeline for patients...
A Lab-Grown Brain Twitched an Isolated Muscle. Here’s Why That’s Amazing
Floating inside a petri dish in a lab at Cambridge University, a single disjointed muscle twitched.
Normally that’s not news. But in this case, the surgically-dissected muscle is controlled by a slice of isolated brain...
Senolytics Show Promise Against Alzheimer’s in Mice
For the past quarter century, scientists battled Alzheimer’s disease under a single guiding principle: that protein clumps—beta-amyloid—deposited outside sensitive brain cells gradually damage neuronal functions and trigger memory loss. The solution seems simple: remove...
The New Science of Psychedelics: A Tool for Changing Our Minds
As our prosperity rises, our mental health is on the decline—and fast. Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction, and other psychological disorders have skyrocketed in recent years, and nobody knows what to do about...
AI Performed Like a Human on a Gestalt Psychology Test
Dr. Been Kim wants to rip open the black box of deep learning.
A senior researcher at Google Brain, Kim specializes in a sort of AI psychology. Like cognitive psychologists before her, she develops various...
A Spotless Mind? Precisely-Timed Anesthesia May Dim Traumatic Memories
We all have things we’d rather forget. But for over four million people in the US who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that need becomes very real.
Erasing memories has always been the stuff...
Flashing Light and Sound Reduced Alzheimer’s Symptoms in Mice
The last thing Dr. Li-Huei Tsai expected to help her Alzheimer’s mice was a disco cage.
Three years back, in a strobe of insight, her team decided to stick mice engineered with a genetic predisposition to...
A New Ion-Drive Transistor Is Here to Interface With Your Brain
Silicon transistors and the brain don’t mix.
At least not optimally. As scientists and companies are increasingly exploring ways to interface your brain with computers, fashioning new hardware that conforms to and compliments our biological...
Giving Neural Nets an Innate Brain-Like Structure Could Bolster Deep Learning
How many times have you heard the following idea? Deep learning, the machine learning technique that has taken the AI world by storm, is loosely inspired by the human brain.
I myself have repeated the...
New Study Suggests You Can Learn While You Sleep
As a chronic insomniac, I have a trick to lure me to sleep without drugs: podcasts.
Every night before bed, I queue up a list of podcasts lengthy enough to last me the night. And...
Neuroscientists Just Found a Way to Image the Brain 1,000 Times Faster Than Ever Before
You know those stories of scientific breakthroughs, in which the lone genius scientist struggles for years until his “eureka!” moment?
Yeah, that’s a lie.
With the big data revolution well under way, today scientific discoveries are...
5 Discoveries That Made 2018 a Huge Year for Neuroscience
2018 was when neuroscience made the impossible possible.
There was the dazzling array of crazy neurotech: paralyzed patients shopped and texted using an Android tablet with just their brain waves; BrainNet let three people collaboratively...
Could an Atlas of the Brain’s Genome Solve Neuropsychiatric Disorders?
Dr. Thomas Lehner was tired of his research repeatedly hitting a wall.
A scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, Lehner studies the genetic underpinnings of neuropsychiatric disorders. Teasing out associated genes turned out...
Are We Made of Memories? A Researcher’s Quest to Record His Life
How well do you remember what happened last week? Two weeks ago? Five weeks from last Tuesday? Unless you are meticulous in recording the events of your life, or something notable happened on a...
The Surprising Parallels Between Netflix’s ‘Maniac’ and Real-Life Therapy Tech
The human mind can be a confusing and overwhelming place. Despite incredible leaps in human progress, many of us still struggle to make our peace with our thoughts. The roots of this are complex...
Paralyzed Patients Can Now Control Android Tablets With Their Minds
Patient T6 was barely middle-aged when she began losing muscle function.
A talented musician with a love for red lipstick, T6 was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a progressive—and unstoppable—neurodegenerative disorder that eats away at...
Incepting Sight? This Brain Implant Lets Blind Patients “See” Letters
For most of us, “eyes” are synonymous with “sight”: whatever our eyes capture, we perceive.
Yet under the hood, eyes are only the first step in an informational relay that transmutes photons into understanding. Light-sensitive...
What Happens to the Brain in Zero Gravity?
NASA has made a commitment to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. This is an ambitious goal when you think that a typical round trip will anywhere between three and six months and...
Hacking the Mind Just Got Easier With These New Tools
For eons, the only way to access the three-pound mushy bio-computer between our ears was to physically crack the skull, or insert a sharp object up the nose.
Lucky for us, these examples of medical...
How BrainNet Enabled 3 People to Directly Transmit Thoughts
For a remarkably social species, we’re not particularly effective communicators.
Finding the right words to clearly, efficient transmit our thoughts to another consciousness—even something as simple as driving directions—can be a challenge, especially in-the-moment and...
DeepMind’s New Research on Linking Memories, and How It Applies to AI
There’s a cognitive quirk humans have that seems deceptively elementary. For example: every morning, you see a man in his 30s walking a boisterous collie. Then one day, a white-haired lady with striking resemblance...
