Neuroscience
Latest significant advancements in neuroscience research. Reporting on the far-reaching impacts of neuroscience on society and humanity.
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...
New Research Shows How Brain-Computer Interaction Is Changing Cinema
Over the past few years, we have seen the extraordinary development of neural prosthetic technologies that can replace or enhance functions of our central nervous system. For example, devices like brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow...
Thinking Like a Human: What It Means to Give AI a Theory of Mind
Last month, a team of self-taught AI gamers lost spectacularly against human professionals in a highly-anticipated galactic melee. Taking place as part of the International Dota 2 Championships in Vancouver, Canada, the game showed...
Amazing New Brain Map of Every Synapse Points to the Roots of Thinking
Imagine a map of every single star in an entire galaxy. A map so detailed that it lays out what each star looks like, what they’re made of, and how each star is connected...
New DNA Synthesis Method Could Soon Build a Genome in a Day
Synthetic biologists are the computer programmers of biology. Their code? DNA.
The whole enterprise sounds fantastical: you insert new snippets of DNA code—in the form of a chain of A, T, C, G letters—into an...
Transdifferentiation Can Create An Endless Supply of Brain Cells—And Fast
Cellular reprogramming is like the fairytale of spinning straw into gold: you take an abundant, mundane cell type, dose it with a cocktail of chemicals, and voilà—now you have an unlimited supply of therapeutic...
Neurons Made From Blood Cells—A New Tool for Understanding Brain Diseases
Our team at Stanford University has just figured out the recipe for converting blood cells from adults directly into nerve cells, or neurons.
You may be wondering why anyone would want to convert blood into...
Robots Will Be Able to Feel Touch With This Artificial Nerve
When the disembodied cockroach leg twitched, Yeongin Kim knew he had finally made it.
A graduate student at Stanford, Kim had been working with an international team of neuroengineers on a crazy project: an artificial...
A Quarter Million Gamers Helped Build This Incredibly Detailed Map of the Brain
EyeWire, neuroscience’s most audacious experiment, just opened up a digital museum.
Constructed with the help of a quarter million gamers, EyeWire Museum is one-of-a-kind: the 3D interactive playground showcases neurons in a mouse’s retina in...
Living Neanderthal ‘Mini-Brains’ May Reveal What Makes Our Brains Special
He isolated DNA from Egyptian mummies. He discovered the Denisovans, an extinct ancient human species, by sequencing DNA from a tiny bone fragment. He led a massive study that reconstructed the Neanderthal genome—and found...
This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours
When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the...
Holograms Can Now Program Brain Activity—Are Fake Experiences Next?
Optogenetics, neuroscience’s hottest mind-control tool, just got a major update.
Projecting 3D-light holograms—yes, holograms!—directly onto a mouse’s cortex, engineers at UC Berkeley instantaneously gained control of dozens of neurons at once.
That’s not the impressive part....
Mini-Brains Just Grew Their Own Blood Vessels—Here’s Why That’s Great News
If you ever put a brain through a Picasso filter, you’d probably get something close to a brain ball.
When brain balls first hit the neuroscience scene in 2013, they were just a curious oddity....
How Will Merging Minds and Machines Change Our Conscious Experience?
One of the most exciting and frightening outcomes of technological advancement is the potential to merge our minds with machines. If achieved, this would profoundly boost our cognitive capabilities. More importantly, however, it could...
This Memory Prosthesis Boosts Recall in Humans by Roughly 40 Percent
This one’s for the books: in a jaw-dropping study, a team just turned the human brain from a read-only memory device to a rewritable one.
"What?" you might ask. Of course the brain is rewritable....
New Bionic Arm Blurs Line Between Self and Machine for Wearers
At 29 years old, Canadian firefighter Rob Anderson lost his left arm and left leg to a harrowing helicopter crash into the side of a mountain. Although fitted with “top of the line” prosthetics...
The Startup That Has to Kill You to Preserve Your Brain—Here’s the Science Behind the Buzz
Here’s something you don’t hear every day: for $10,000, an MIT-backed startup will preserve your brain right down to the synapse level. Within this century, the company pitched, future neuroscientists will extract the information...
How Brain Stimulation Can Boost Memory If Paired With Learning
In 47 CE, Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, described in his Compositiones a method for treating chronic migraines: place torpedo fish on the scalps of patients to ease their pain...
Powerful New Algorithm Is a Big Step Towards Whole-Brain Simulation
The renowned physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand. Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
An increasingly influential subfield of neuroscience has taken Feynman’s...
In Landmark Study, Human Stem Cells Restore Monkeys’ Movement After Spinal Cord Injury
Stem cell therapy is highly attractive in its intuitive simplicity: you clean out injured cells, plop down a gang of healthy replacements, sit back, and wait for the body to heal itself.
For spinal cord...
This Sensor Lets Scientists See Neuron-Level Brain Activity in Real Time
Picture this: you’re at a boisterous party, trying to listen in on a group conversation. People are talking over each other and going a mile a minute, but you can only pick up snippets...
Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency
Move over, deep learning. Neuromorphic computing—the next big thing in artificial intelligence—is on fire.
Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain.
The first, published in Nature...
Here’s the Tech That Could One Day Track, Boost, or Erase Human Memory
Human memories are notoriously fallible. We forget things, misremember things, and often don’t even know what we no longer know.
What if there was a way to flip through the catalog of our precious memories...
How the Science of Decision-Making Will Help Us Make Better Strategic Choices
Neuroscientist Brie Linkenhoker believes that leaders must be better prepared for future strategic challenges by continually broadening their worldviews.
As the director of Worldview Stanford, Brie and her team produce multimedia content and immersive learning...
Darker Still: Black Mirror’s New Season Envisions Neurotech Gone Wrong
The key difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction is entirely possible because of its grounding in scientific facts, while fantasy is not. This is where Black Mirror is both an...
The 7 Hub Stories That Got the Most Social Media Love This Year
I bet you think 2017 was a hot mess, a relentless series of tragedies and catastrophes that exposed humanity for what little it's worth. Let us re-instill in you a sense of optimism with...
Do Our Brains Use Deep Learning to Make Sense of the World?
The first time Dr. Blake Richards heard about deep learning, he was convinced that he wasn’t just looking at a technique that would revolutionize artificial intelligence. He also knew he was looking at something...
These Creepy Mini-Brains May Finally Crack Deadly Brain Cancer
Brain organoids look like something between a malformed human brain and a character from Monsters, Inc.
But don’t be fooled by their grotesque appearance. Ever since their introduction three years ago, brain organoids—charmingly dubbed “mini-brains”...
Neuroscience Could Bring Us Eternal Bliss, But Is That a Good Thing?
What if the secret to eternal happiness is a brain implant?
If you’re thinking that sounds like the premise of a Black Mirror episode, you’re not alone. Yet at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference...
How Bursts of Ultrasound Can Be Used to Flip Switches in the Brain
It sounds like the beginning of a Stephen King novel: a protagonist bolts up in bed, his unsuspecting brain picking up ultrasound waves crashing in the air. These waves have the power to fry...
Thought-Controlled Prosthetic Hand Restores 100 Realistic Touch Sensations
When Keven Walgamott reached out and grasped his wife’s hand, his face broke into an enormous smile.
For the first time in 14 years, he could feel her soft fingers, pressing firmly into his prosthetic...
Scientists Call Out Ethical Concerns for the Future of Neurotechnology
For some die-hard tech evangelists, using neural interfaces to merge with AI is the inevitable next step in humankind's evolution. But a group of 27 neuroscientists, ethicists, and machine learning experts have highlighted the...
A ‘Google Maps’ for the Mouse Brain Details Neurons Like Never Before
Ask any neuroscientist to draw you a neuron, and it’ll probably look something like a star with two tails: one stubby with extensive tree-like branches, the other willowy, lengthy and dotted with spindly spikes.
While...
Here’s What We Think Alzheimer’s Does to the Brain
Around 50 million people worldwide are thought to have Alzheimer’s disease. And with rapidly aging populations in many countries, the number of sufferers is steadily rising.
We know that Alzheimer’s is caused by problems in...
Here’s How to Get to Conscious Machines, Neuroscientists Say
“We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” – Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Unlike the director leads you to believe, the protagonist of...
Neuroeducation Will Lead to Big Breakthroughs in Learning
In recent decades we’ve seen the rise of an emerging interdisciplinary field that brings together neuroscientists and educators. As technologies like brain mapping and scanning continue to advance our understanding of the human brain,...
