Samer Siwani
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…