Summary: Researchers show that recurrent, wave-generating cortical circuits continuously tune their synaptic weights to internalize the statistical structure of the external world. Functionally resembling biological generative models, these traveling neural waves help the brain infer sensory causes, form internal representations, produce short-term predictions, and replay sequential memories of events unfolding in time. Key Facts The … Read more

Summary: This perspective review lays out a roadmap for next-generation cognitive brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). To extend BCI applications beyond motor paralysis into psychiatric and cognitive disorders—such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and OCD—research must move from static motor-cortical decoding to real-time tracking of dynamic, multi-region brain networks. The review highlights the need to integrate intracranial signal … Read more

Summary: Moving beyond traditional views that treat memory and computation as static synaptic weights or isolated neuronal spikes, researchers modeled local functional circuits as parameterized digital neural ensembles embedded within a multi-scale “neural sphere.” Their analysis shows that information in the brain is carried by collective spatio-temporal electrical patterns governed by nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and … Read more

Summary: A research team has shown that an intuition for two-dimensional geometry is shared across species and ages: olive baboons, Rhesus macaques, young human children, and adults all rely on the same basic mental processes to judge geometric similarity. By comparing touchscreen data from free-ranging primates with performance from U.S. preschoolers, American adults, and 79 … Read more

Summary: Using wide-field two-photon calcium imaging while mice performed a temporal expectation task, researchers simultaneously recorded thousands of neurons in the secondary motor cortex (M2) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). The team found that M2 and PPC are neither perfectly synchronized nor fully independent. Instead, they operate in a balanced regime where sparse inter-regional … Read more

Summary: Researchers show that stable cooperation can arise spontaneously even without advanced cognition or complex social rules. Through evolutionary models, large-scale simulations, and populations of artificial agents, the team demonstrates that simple opponent-specific responses—the basic ability to change behavior depending on which partner is encountered—are sufficient for cooperative communities to outcompete purely selfish strategies and … Read more

Summary: Losing one hour of sleep during the spring daylight saving time (DST) change is associated with up to a 30% higher risk of developing serious retinal vascular conditions—such as proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) and neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD)—within the following month. Conversely, gaining an hour of sleep after the autumn return to standard … Read more

Summary: Researchers comparing people with autoimmune limbic encephalitis to healthy control subjects used spatial memory tests and brain imaging to show that errors in object-location memory are directly associated with clinical apathy. This behavioral change is independent of depression and general cognitive decline. Neurobiological analysis revealed that patients who made more object-location errors and who … Read more

Summary: Researchers have shown that tissue-specific damage in neurodegenerative disease depends on the regional abundance and isoform-specific binding preferences of the partner protein Capicua (CIC). The study demonstrates that CIC-Long (CIC-L) preferentially associates with ATXN1, while CIC-Short (CIC-S) preferentially pairs with ATXN1L (Ataxin-1-like). These distinct isoform partnerships explain why subtle differences in protein interactions lead … Read more

Summary: Long before cinema existed, the 19th-century boom in mass printing produced a similar cultural worry: that external images would crowd out private imagination. As illustrated editions of classic novels proliferated, critics and artists — including Charles Dickens’s contemporaries and Edward Burne-Jones — warned that pictures imposed by publishers threatened the private realm of the … Read more