What's up in
Faced with a decision, the brain weighs its options by bundling them into rapidly alternating cycles of brain waves.
While we sleep, one kind of slow brain wave helps to reinforce memories, but a competing wave weakens them.
Researchers found that elongating certain brain signals in rats improved their memory. The work revealed a new property to look out for in the hunt for “biomarkers” of learning.
Two new studies show that the brain’s navigation system changes how it represents physical space to reflect personal experience.
The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events.
Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.
Stem cells seem to retain memories of old injuries to improve future healing. When that system goes wrong, chronic inflammation can result.
Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, suggesting that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain.
Evidence mounts that organisms without nervous systems can in some sense learn and solve problems, but researchers disagree about whether this is “primitive cognition.”