Neuroscience

Political partisans would like you to believe voters' heads will explode if faced with candidates crossing party lines on key policies - a Democrat who opposes abortion, say, or a Republican who supports gun control.

Mice have brain cells that are dedicated to storing memories of other mice, according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists. These cells, found in a region of the hippocampus known as the ventral CA1, store “social memories” that help…

People who are too frightened of flying to board an airplane, or too scared of spiders to venture into the basement, can seek a kind of treatment called exposure therapy. In a safe environment, they repeatedly face cues such as photos of…

MIT neuroscientists have discovered connections deep within the brain that appear to form a communication pathway between areas that control emotion, decision-making, and movement. The researchers suspect that these connections, which they…

When asked to visualize your childhood home, you can probably picture not only the house you lived in, but also the buildings next door and across the street. MIT neuroscientists have now identified two brain regions that are involved in…

The brain connects sensory information from the environment to our subjective experiences, resulting in our perceptions, emotions, and memories. However, our brains need to disconnect — i.e., sleep — from the noisy sensory world that we’re…

On August 7, 2016, the New York Times Magazine published “The Brain That Couldn’t Remember,” an article adapted from the forthcoming book “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets,” by Luke Dittrich. The article is…

A new study from MIT reveals that a brain region dedicated to reading has connections for that skill even before children learn to read. By scanning the brains of children before and after they learned to read, the researchers found that…

MIT engineers have developed a microfluidic device that replicates the neuromuscular junction — the vital connection where nerve meets muscle. The device, about the size of a U.S. quarter, contains a single muscle strip and a small set of…

On Tuesday, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation announced the winners of its annual Klerman and Freedman Prizes. Kay M. Tye, the Whitehead Career Development Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the…

MIT researchers have developed a new technique for imaging brain tissue at multiple scales, allowing them to peer at molecules within cells or take a wider view of the long-range connections between neurons. This technique, known as…

People with Rett Syndrome, a rare and debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder, exhibit many autism-like traits. Now researchers at MIT have identified a protein that plays an important role in the disorder. The researchers have found that…

Cells contain thousands of messenger RNA molecules, which carry copies of DNA’s genetic instructions to the rest of the cell. MIT engineers have now developed a way to visualize these molecules in higher resolution than previously possible…

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 an assistant professor in the MIT departments of Chemical Engineering…

Some mental illnesses may stem, in part, from the brain’s inability to correctly assign emotional associations to events. For example, people who are depressed often do not feel happy even when experiencing something that they normally…

Male zebra finches, small songbirds native to central Australia, learn their songs by copying what they hear from their fathers. These songs, often used as mating calls, develop early in life as juvenile birds experiment with mimicking the…

MIT chemical engineers and neuroscientists have developed a new way to classify neurons by labeling and imaging the proteins found in each cell. This type of imaging offers clues to each neuron’s function and should help in mapping the…

Although it is known that psychiatric disorders have a strong genetic component, untangling the web of genes contributing to each disease is a daunting task. Scientists have found hundreds of genes that are mutated in patients with…

Scientists have long wondered if the human brain contains neural mechanisms specific to music perception. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds…

MIT and Harvard University neuroscientists have found a link between a behavioral symptom of autism and reduced activity of a neurotransmitter whose job is to dampen neuron excitation. The findings suggest that drugs that boost the action…