Summary: Psilocybin — the active principle behind “magic mushrooms” — is emerging as a promising treatment for depression, anxiety and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet many patients and clinicians are concerned about the intense hallucinatory experiences these drugs can produce. Researchers have now developed modified psilocin derivatives that aim to preserve therapeutic benefits while minimizing hallucinogenic … Read more

Summary: Ketamine has been recognized for years as a rapid-acting treatment for depression, yet its precise action in the human brain remained unclear. A new study using a world-first PET imaging tracer now reveals how ketamine produces swift antidepressant effects by altering AMPA receptor dynamics and restoring synaptic plasticity in specific brain regions. Researchers directly … Read more

Summary: The usual story about aging is that it brings an unavoidable slide into physical and cognitive decline. But a major longitudinal study of older Americans suggests a different, more hopeful picture: over a decade, a large share of older adults showed measurable improvement. Researchers found that mindset — how people think about growing older … Read more

Summary: Current treatments for Alzheimer’s disease typically rely on repeated, high-dose infusions of monoclonal antibodies to slow cognitive decline by clearing amyloid-beta protein. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have developed a potentially transformative alternative: CAR-astrocytes. Using a harmless viral vector to deliver a gene encoding a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to astrocytes—the brain’s … Read more

Summary: Adolescence can be a turbulent period socially, and a new longitudinal study finds that patterns of interpersonal aggression in early teenage years are linked to measurable physical aging by age 30. Following more than 120 individuals from early adolescence into adulthood, researchers report that teens who habitually lashed out at parents and peers were … Read more

Summary: For decades, neuroscientists believed that learning made the brain more efficient by encouraging neurons to act independently—each doing its part with minimal overlap. A new study from the University of Rochester challenges that idea: as people learn a visual task, neurons in the visual cortex become more coordinated, sharing information to form a more … Read more

Summary: From the “brain fog” reported after COVID-19 to the cognitive decline linked to HIV and hepatitis, viral infections can leave a lasting impact on memory, attention, and mental processing. A large cross-disciplinary meta-analysis examined more than 900 scientific papers to map the immune signatures that predict recovery or deterioration of cognitive function after infection. … Read more

Summary: Have you ever had a memory on the tip of your tongue that you couldn’t fully recall? New research suggests your brain may briefly reactivate that memory even when you are not consciously aware of it. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and machine learning, scientists found that specific memory patterns can reappear in the brain without … Read more

Summary: For years, accumulation of the tau protein has been recognized as a central feature of Alzheimer’s disease. New research reveals how the brain clears tau: specialized non-neuronal cells called tanycytes act as a waste-shuttle, capturing toxic tau from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and transferring it into the bloodstream for removal. The study shows that … Read more

Summary: We all possess skills that are hard to explain — the precise pressure that keeps a bicycle upright or the instinctive judgment a specialist applies when viewing a complex image. These abilities are examples of tacit knowledge: practical know-how that is difficult to verbalize. New research from MIT shows that some of this unconscious … Read more