A 22-year-old woman from the Netherlands who suffers from a chronic bone disorder has had the top section of her skull removed and replaced with a 3D printed implant

Neuroscientists today report the first results from experimental tests designed to explore the idea that "forgetting" might not be a bad thing, and that it may represent a form of learning—and...

Scientific Reports - Attention rhythmically samples multi-feature objects in working memory

Electric fields drive the electrical activity of networks of neurons to produce a shared representation of the information stored in working memory, a new MIT study finds.

Across mammalian species, brain waves are slower in deep cortical layers, while superficial layers generate faster rhythms.

Simultaneous measurement of neural rhythms and spikes across five brain areas in animals reveals how propofol induces unconsciousness

Microsaccades (MSs) are commonly associated with spatially directed attention, but how they affect visual processing is still not clear. We studied MSs in a task in which the animal was randomly cued...

Non-oscillatory brain activity during human REM sleep reconfigures neural dynamics to support memory consolidation.

The human brain is made up of around 86 billion neurons, linked by trillions of connections. For decades, scientists have believed that we need to map this intricate connectivity in detail to...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - The thalamus is a subcortical structure that is highly interconnected with various brain regions. In this Perspective, Kai Hwang and colleagues examine the role of the...

It is increasingly clear that memories are distributed across multiple brain areas. Such “engram complexes” are important features of memory formation and consolidation. Here, we test the hypothesis...

Certain brain layers specialize in particular waves—which might aid understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - In this Review, Panzeri, Moroni, Safaai and Harvey explain how the levels and structures of correlations among the activity of neurons in a population shape...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - The thalamus is a subcortical structure that is highly interconnected with various brain regions. In this Perspective, Kai Hwang and colleagues examine the role of the...

Nature Human Behaviour - How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between...

Abstract. Working memory is where thoughts are held and manipulated. For many years, the dominant model was that working memory relied on steady-state neural dynamics. A neural representation was...

Oscillatory neural activity is believed to have a central role in information processing in the mammalian brain. While early studies often focussed on the function of individual frequency bands,...

Nature Communications - The prefrontal cortex interacts with the hippocampus to guide memory, but the mechanisms driving functional connectivity are unknown. Here, the authors demonstrate that the...

Electric fields coordinate brain networks to encode memories.

Musical training can have a dramatic impact on your brain’s structure, enhancing your memory, spatial reasoning and language skills

Nature - The hippocampal code in freely flying bats is highly stable over days and across contexts if behaviour is taken into account.

A repurposed antidepressant might help treat COVID-19, a remarkable study found. The way this research was funded highlights a big problem—and bigger opportunity—in American science.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are involved in the regulation of defensive behavior under threat, but their eng...

Nature Communications - The factors that determine the direction of traveling waves in the brain are not well understood. Here, the authors show that the sum of incoming structural connection...

Nature - Temporarily holding on to information depends on coordinated brain waves.

Nature - The Human Brain Project wraps up in September after a decade. Nature examines its achievements and its troubled past.

A bold new theory proposes that electric fields could be the architects of the innermost workings of the brain.

Propofol, a drug commonly used for general anesthesia, induces unconsciousness by disrupting the brain’s normal balance between stability and excitability, according to a new study by MIT researchers.

Abstract figure legend The widely observed phenomenon of bursting is reviewed in terms of generation mechanisms, transmission mechanisms and function particularly in terms of plasticity and attenti...

Heartbeat-induced pulsations of cerebral blood vessels can directly entrain neuronal activity.

Abstract. Patricia Goldman-Rakic (1937–2003), the co-founder of this journal, was a pioneering neuroscientist who made transformational discoveries about t

Kucewicz et al. review the role of high frequency gamma and ripple oscillations in human memory and cognition, and propose that these fast activity bursts

Neural oscillations are evident across cortex but their spatial structure is not well-explored. Are oscillations stationary or do they form “traveling waves”, i.e., spatially organized patterns whose...

Horizontal cortical networks preferentially connect neurons with shared tuning preferences. Davis et al. demonstrate that this connectivity generates activity motifs that reflect shared excitability...

Nature Communications - How the brain transitions between sleep and wakefulness is not well understood. Here, the authors discover that a sequence of activity unfolds across the thalamus before...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - In this Review, Bradley, Nydam, Dux and Mattingley explore state-dependent variations in brain activity and behaviour with brain stimulation. They focus on...

Nature Neuroscience - Neuronal recordings show that primate superior colliculus encodes learned abstract visual categories. The authors demonstrate that it plays a causal role in categorization...

Nature Machine Intelligence - A fundamental question in neuroscience is what are the constraints that shape the structural and functional organization of the brain. By bringing biological cost...

The organization of temporal information is critical for the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories. In the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal ...

Nature Communications - Memory loss is a known result of cholinergic dysfunction, yet the neural basis for this effect remains unknown. Here, the authors demonstrate that the way cholinergic...

Ocklenburg and Guo review the current state of knowledge on cross-hemispheric communication in the vertebrate brain, with a focus on recent research in rodents. They discuss how lateralization in...

New research suggests that large waves of electrical activity washing across your brain while you sleep help push garbage in the surrounding fluid out of the brain.

Nature - The new president has the opportunity to reverse four years of anti-science policies — but he also inherits a nation divided.

Summary During decision-making attention plays a pivotal role by guiding information sampling between alternatives. We need to optimally encode different options and compare between them. So far the...

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can

This article presents evidence indicating that intracranial pressure (ICP) pulsatility, associated with the heartbeat and breathing, is not just a source of mechanical artefact in electrical record...

Adaptive visual processing is enabled through the dynamic interplay between top-down and bottom-up (feedback/feedforward) information exchange, presumably propagated through brain oscillations. Here...

Human working memory is a key cognitive process that engages multiple functional anatomical nodes across the brain. Despite a plethora of correlati...

Nature - Experiments in mice alternating between a visual working memory task and a task that is independent of working memory provide insight into the neural representation of working memory and...

Princeton neuroscientists have demonstrated that attention and working memory are two sides of the same neural coin. What's more, they have observed the coin as it flips inside the brain.

Holding information in mind may mean storing it among synapses

To examine the biological building blocks of thought and action, we created biologically realistic local circuits based on detailed well-cited physiological and anatomical characteristics. These...

Nature - A task in which participants learned to perform inference led to the formation of hippocampal representations whose geometric properties reflected the latent structure of the task,...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - In this Review, Panzeri, Moroni, Safaai and Harvey explain how the levels and structures of correlations among the activity of neurons in a population shape...

A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is explaining how widespread brain regions flexibly interact to support behaviors. We hypothesize that a mechanism of neural coordination is brain oscillations...

Recent studies have provided evidence for the concurrent encoding of sensory percepts and visual working memory contents (VWM) across visual areas; however, it has remained unclear how these two...

Traveling waves of activity are a prevalent phenomenon within neural networks of diverse brain regions and species[1][1]–[4][2], and have been implicated in myriad brain functions including sensory...

A MIT economist’s study shows that life sciences change course after star scientists die during their active careers.

To form a perceptual decision, the brain must acquire samples of evidence from the environment and incorporate them in computations that mediate choice behavior. While much is known about the neural...