Audio research news

Finlay, who died on 12 September, championed the idea that developmental constraints dictate how evolution sculpts brains, a concept she used to model the timing of hundreds of events and align them across mammalian species.

Many complex behaviors have stubbornly resisted mechanistic explanations. Deciphering them will require new approaches—and perhaps a new concept of “understanding.”

The two groups study the same behavioral phenomena yet rarely interact or read each other’s work—a mutual blind spot that weakens both fields. New technologies offer a chance to bring them together.

Fiona Sanderson, a senior program manager at the Brain Canada Foundation, shares how she got into grant administration and how she helps connect researchers with funding and one another.

Work by Jeffrey Moran and Robert Desimone showed that monkeys could focus their attention on different stimuli in their visual field without shifting their gaze. Their work marked a key milestone in the emergence of cognitive neuroscience.

In two 1926 articles, Edgar Douglas Adrian revealed that neurons communicate through trains of spikes.

To enhance AI safety, take a lesson from biological brains; a small set of wants maintains durable control over a much larger cognitive system.

Each of the frog’s eight fingers branches into 16 ultra-sensitive tips, which together function as a fovea—potentially the first demonstration of this type of sensory structure outside of mammals.

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

A process that uses a lottery system saves time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.

A 2011 Nature study found that loss of a nicotinic receptor subunit leads to increased nicotine intake in mice. The work set the standard for how to functionally validate genetic association study findings in neuroscience.

At Blackrock Neurotech, Spencer Kellis develops implantable devices that help people with brain and spinal cord conditions communicate, move and more.

Infantile amnesia is not simply a story about forgetting the past. It is an opportunity to understand how memory itself is built.

Thanks to recent progress in physics-based simulators and robotics, it has never been easier for neuroscientists to use neuromechanical modeling to test hypotheses about animal movement.

Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality, or treating it as an end-all quantification of some aspect of neural computation, may hinder progress in understanding the brain.

José E. García-Arrarás studies how these marine invertebrates manage to regrow their nervous system, intestines and other internal organs in a matter of months after threats prompt them to literally spill their guts.

As the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies Congress kicks off next week, its president shares how the organization aims to foster collaborations and provide high-quality training for young neuroscientists in the region.

With agentic AI’s rapid infiltration into science, researchers need to develop AI use policies and practices.

Five years after a groundbreaking paper, can a young field move beyond piecemeal studies?

Precise optogenetic modulation of a medullary neuron population reveals their role in anxiety-like behaviors.

The ability to record from large populations of neurons has triggered the development of myriad methods for comparing them. But we’re still grappling with how to convert measures of likeness into a better mechanistic understanding.

In a 2007  Science  paper, Mark Mayford and his colleagues found that some neurons activated during learning are also recruited during memory retrieval. Noelia Weisstaub shares how this study and others drove an era of great progress in tool development.

Neurons have long taken top billing in memory, but researchers are making the case for astrocytes.

Neuroscience in Chile, and across Latin America, does not lack talent or ideas, but the systems that make science visible—prestigious journals, conferences and networks—increasingly price its researchers out.

In most mammalian retinas, rods outnumber cones. But that ratio is flipped in ground squirrels, a quirk that helps Seth Blackshaw explore how retinal cells develop their identities.