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brains

Latest Articles

Neuroscientist Anil Seth in his darkened laboratory at the University of Sussex.
Q&A

Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

By Dan Falk
September 30, 2021
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How does consciousness arise in mere flesh and blood? To the neuroscientist Anil Seth, our organic bodies are the key to the experience.

Artist’s conception of DNA breaking.
neuroscience

To Learn More Quickly, Brain Cells Break Their DNA

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 30, 2021
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New work shows that neurons and other brain cells use DNA double-strand breaks, often associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging, to quickly express genes related to learning and memory.

An artist’s conception of the ways that functional capacities have been mapped to regions of the brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 24, 2021
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Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging.

An illustration of a network of neurons, each one equipped with its own stopwatch.
neuroscience

Neurons Unexpectedly Encode Information in the Timing of Their Firing

By Elena Renken
July 7, 2021
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A temporal pattern of activity observed in human brains may explain how we can learn so quickly.

Video of a hydra moving against a dark background.
sleep

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof.

By Veronique Greenwood
May 18, 2021
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Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

Illustration of red spools with strands of DNA as the thread, with a blue brain in the background.
Quantized Columns

Can Machines Control Our Brains?

By R. Douglas Fields
May 17, 2021
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Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

Animation of a neuron that periodically alters its responses to stimuli when it is reset into a new state by another input.
neural networks

Artificial Neural Nets Finally Yield Clues to How Brains Learn

By Anil Ananthaswamy
February 18, 2021
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The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.

An illustration of a human brain against “pink noise” static.
neuroscience

Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries

By Elizabeth Landau
February 8, 2021
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By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more.

2020 in Review

The Year in Biology

By John Rennie
December 23, 2020
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While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent priority, biologists also learned more about how brains process information, how to define individuality and why sleep deprivation kills.


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