Looking for Neuroscience Lectures or tailored talks?
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An interview with palaeontologist Hady George, a PhD student in Professor Emily Rayfield’s group at the University of Bristol, who has worked on the endocasts of stem-mammals (George et al., 2024) and dinosaurs including T. rex (Caspar et al., 2024). In this article series I will summarise some of what we know, how we know it, and why it matters with the help of a few experts in the field. Read more →
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The largest single-site psychedelic neuroimaging study to date finds that psilocybin doesn’t simply disorder the brain’s activity. Under the drug, brain dynamics became more structured, not less, and the strength of that structure tracked how intense and meaningful participants found the experience. The apparent “chaos” reported by earlier studies may be an artefact of how the data was analysed. Read more →
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A prevailing hypothesis in neuroscience is that individual neurons are selective for a function (Hirokawa et al., 2019), specialised for a particular task. However, more and more papers are published invoking differential functions and behavioural effects for the same neuron types. The categorical selectivity may not be the rule, but an exception, according to a recent study. Read more →
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Modern neuroscience typically teaches a history that begins with the ancient Greeks, skips nearly two thousand years, and resumes with European thinkers of the Renaissance. This narrative ignores non-Western discoveries entirely, and reinforces a Eurocentric story in which progress radiates outward from Europe. In reality, during those “silent” centuries, scholars across the Islamic world, India, and China were actively advancing the understanding of the brain, the nervous system, and the mind. Read more →
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A study published in July in Nature Neuroscience by Thompson et al. has revealed that replay and consolidation of procedural memories do occur during sleep; however, the process involves another structure called the striatum (associated with motor/procedural functions), and not the hippocampus. Read more →
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Most of the general public are familiar with brainwaves. However, a very small minority are aware of the uncertainty that prevails in the electrophysiology field. Ever since the first recorded signal by Hans Berger (Berger, 1929), alpha waves, most prominent in the visual cortex, we have been bewildered as to what they are. Mathematically minded researchers have been enjoying their time investigating behavioural and physiological correlates of brainwaves or oscillations as they are referred to in the field. Read more →
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Researchers systematically reviewed existing studies (18) on psychological and biological outcomes of mindfulness-based interventions for premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in a total of 1,080 individuals. Read more →
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Swedish News, In a Phase 1/2 open-label trial out of a collaboration between Lund and Cambridge universities, and conducted in Skåne University Hospital. Researchers evaluated the therapeutic potential of transplanting laboratory-produced dopaminergic progenitor cells into the brains of Parkinson’s patients. Earlier approaches relied on fetal tissue donations, which face significant supply constraints. The progenitor cells used in this study can be cultured at scale under standardised manufacturing conditions, enabling broader clinical application with consistent quality assurance. Eight participants received the STEM-PD cell product across two dose levels, four received a lower dose and four received a higher dose. The surgical… Read more →
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Imagine a $200 device replacing $10,000/month monitoring solution that can detect the invisible seizures in newborns, using AI-powered neonatal EEG for resource-limited settings. A device that allows for effective neonatal neuroprotection in developing countries and beyond. Neonatal seizures can be a massive problem due to their subclinical symptomatology. They are essentially invisible. Approximately 50-80% of them are invisible to clinicians in Brazil according to Professor Richardson Leão out of UFRN. I approached him for an interview on this topic as he and his collaborators are working on a cheap, simple and ingenious solution to this issue. “unmanaged convulsions lead to… Read more →
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Opinion, You see your dog whine when you leave. Does he feel sadness, or is he just reacting? And how could you possibly know? If you would attempt to answer that question empirically, you would struggle greatly. Because emotions are a concept defined by humans to describe experiences we believe are universal. However, experiences may be species specific or even subjective. We have to lay the groundwork for this topic on a reasonable philosophical and scientific basis. In this opinion piece, I will try to analyse the neuroscientific/philosophical question of mind and anthropomorphism. I will specifically try to answer whether… Read more →