How Your Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions
[ad_1] Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that…
All the Actually Important Stuff Neuralink Just Announced
[ad_1] The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have electrodes on their…
For Alzheimer’s Scientists, the Amyloid Debate Has No Easy Answers
[ad_1] Watching the Alzheimer’s research world from the outside over the past two years has felt like a car ride over an unpaved mountain road without a seatbelt. In 2021,…
This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible
[ad_1] Further evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be…
The Quest to Treat Binge-Eating and Addiction—With Brain Zaps
[ad_1] “It may be that stimulation of the nucleus accumbens altered the reward circuitry in the brain such that it turned down the volume on the pleasurable craving that patients…
Lab-Grown Human Brain Tissue Works in Rats
[ad_1] The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells…
A Huge New Data Set Pushes the Limits of Neuroscience
[ad_1] So neuroscientists use an approach called “dimensionality reduction” to make such visualization possible—they take data from thousands of neurons and, by applying clever techniques from linear algebra, describe their…
To Understand Brain Disorders, Consider the Astrocyte
[ad_1] This was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One…
This Man Set the Record for Wearing a Brain-Computer Interface
[ad_1] With so few people outfitted with these devices, their longevity is still unknown. So far, the Utah array has lasted up to 10 years in monkeys. In Copeland’s case,…
The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor
[ad_1] Sophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and…
VR Still Stinks Because It Doesn’t Smell
[ad_1] VR still stinks, and its stench has many notes. It reeks of rich white guys, who wildly overfund and consistently overhype the always-on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough technology. It has a festering funk…