Claims that the gut microbiome causally contributes to autism regularly appear in the scientific literature and popular press. Mitchell et al. critically examine influential studies underpinning these...

Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

In order to understand the constantly changing acoustic world our brains must maintain elements of auditory scenes in memory. The neural mechanisms for this fundamental process remain unclear. Here, w...

YouTube video by Andrew Huberman

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics.

Does including emotions improve reinforcement-learning models? A recent EEG study by Heffner and colleagues presents separate neural signatures for reward and emotion prediction errors. This advance invites questions about, and even holds clues to, which ingredients of emotion and prediction errors most improve reinforcement-learning models.

Speech brain-computer interfaces face challenges scaling across individuals with different brain organization. Using minimally invasive recordings from 25 patients, the authors developed transfer learning methods that enable robust speech decoding even with incomplete brain coverage.

During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

This episode features Dr. Monique Smith (Assistant Professor, UCSD) discussing faculty job applications with host Dr. Nancy Padilla-Coreano.

Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We argue that these circuit interactions are better captured by alternative theories, which we summarize under the umbrella term BELIEF. We review how BELIEF theories account for the inter-areal interactions during attentive perception.

Brielle Ferguson and Angeline Dukes discuss Black in Neuro, the power of visibility in representation and critical lessons about mentorship.

Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools. I asked nine experts to weigh in.

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...

Mechanical forces are extensively involved in pregnancy and parturition, but their precise roles and mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we identify mechanically activated ion channels PIEZO1 a...

As an animal moves within its environment, self-motion signals are generated by the inner ear vestibular organs and the retina and transmitted to the CNS. In this Review, Mao and Gu describe how these...

Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...