October 2015

Imagine you are looking for your wallet on a cluttered desk. As you scan the area, you hold in your mind a mental picture of what your wallet looks like. MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain region that stores this type of…

Professor emeritus of chemistry and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Charles (Chuck) Shank is one of two scientists to receive the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the federal go..

Kwanghun (KC) Chung, investigator of neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, core faculty of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Samuel A. Goldblith Professor of Applied Biology in the…

Robert Goldberg never spent much time thinking about fashion. All that changed six years ago, however, when as a visiting neuroscientist at John Gabrieli’s lab in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, he co-founded Neumitra. The…

Two young female postdoctoral fellows at UC Berkeley this week received $60,000 fellowships from the L’Oréal For Women in Science program, in exchange for which they commit to mentoring girls and wome..

Genetic research suggests that hundreds of genes are likely risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. This heterogeneity presents both challenges and opportunities when it comes to developing effective treatments for…

Sleep is usually considered an all-or-nothing state: The brain is either entirely awake or entirely asleep. However, MIT neuroscientists have discovered a brain circuit that can trigger small regions of the brain to fall asleep or become…

Keeping track of time is critical for many tasks, such as playing the piano, swinging a tennis racket, or holding a conversation. Neuroscientists at MIT and Columbia University have now figured out how neurons in one part of the brain…

MIT researchers are developing a computer system that uses genetic, demographic, and clinical data to help predict the effects of disease on brain anatomy. In experiments, they trained a machine-learning system on MRI data from patients…

When the eyes are open, visual information flows from the retina through the optic nerve and into the brain, which assembles this raw information into objects and scenes. Scientists have previously hypothesized that objects are…