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neuroscience

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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.

Nobel Prize

Medicine Nobel Prize Goes to Temperature and Touch Discoveries

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 4, 2021
Read Later

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of how we detect heat and touch.

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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
Read Later

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.


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