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brains

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Illustration of a person remembering the orientation of an arrow, but also a range of other orientations it might have had.
neuroscience

Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories

By Veronique Greenwood
January 18, 2022
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The electrical chatter of our working memories reflects our uncertainty about their contents.

2021 in Review

The Year in Biology

By John Rennie
December 21, 2021
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The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.

artificial intelligence

AI Researchers Fight Noise by Turning to Biology

By Allison Whitten
December 7, 2021
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Tiny amounts of artificial noise can fool neural networks, but not humans. Some researchers are looking to neuroscience for a fix.

3D model of several pyramidal neurons in cortical layer 5 of mammalian brain.
neuroscience

New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors

By Monique Brouillette
December 6, 2021
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Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of “wiring diagrams” alone.

Illustration of tangled branches that can also look like the folds in a brain.
neuroscience

To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions

By Anil Ananthaswamy
November 15, 2021
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Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

immunology

The Brain Can Recall and Reawaken Past Immune Responses

By Esther Landhuis
November 8, 2021
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The brain not only helps to regulate immune responses, but also stores and retrieves “memories” of them.

An illustration that shows words and music from an opera singer going into a listener’s brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 21, 2021
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Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.

an artistic representation of a brain in a dish on a blue table with enlarged neurons and a neural network, against a red background with a signal of neural bursts
neural networks

Neuron Bursts Can Mimic Famous AI Learning Strategy

By Allison Whitten
October 18, 2021
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A new model of learning centers on bursts of neural activity that act as teaching signals — approximating backpropagation, the algorithm behind learning in AI.

Photo of rat climbing through a lattice of thin rods.
neuroscience

How Animals Map 3D Spaces Surprises Brain Researchers

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 14, 2021
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When animals move through 3D spaces, the neat system of grid cell activity they use for navigating on flat surfaces gets more disorderly. That has implications for some ideas about memory and other processes.


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