Yale researchers’ discovery of a key molecule in the brain could lead to potential treatments for neurocognitive disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.

Scientists are looking more closely at how viruses and infections could influence our minds.

Within hours of birth, a baby’s gaze is drawn to faces. Now, brain scans of newborns reveal the neurobiology underlying this behavior, showing that as young as six days a baby’s brain appears hardwired for the specialized tasks of seeing faces and seeing places.

In the 1980s, psychologist James Flynn discovered that, over the past century, our average IQ has increased dramatically.

The strange, startling, and competing explanations for human—and possibly nonhuman—consciousness.

Signalling from the sympathetic nervous system of mice when subjected to stress leads to the depletion of a stem-cell population in their hair follicles. This discovery sheds light on why stress turns hair prematurely grey.

A new study from Boston University is the first to illustrate that the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid pulses during sleep, and that these motions are closely tied with brain wave activity and blood flow. It may confirm the hypothesis that CSF flow and slow-wave activity both help flush toxic, memory-impairing proteins from the brain.

Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital find that participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress.

They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains.

"Take emotion out of the equation, memory can seem frustratingly random—trivial events can stick in our minds for a lifetime," says Charles Fernyhough.

In January, we broke the news that we may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s disease. For decades, it had been thought that the condition is caused by a protein called beta-amyloid going awry in the brain. But in 2019, evidence pointed the finger elsewhere: at Porphyromonas gingivalis, a type of bacteria involved in gum disease.

In findings published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers were able to predict attention problems, as well as mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, in young grade school children using functional MRI.

Mothers’ and babies’ brains can work together as a ‘mega-network’ by synchronising brain waves when they interact. The level of connectivity of the brain waves varies according to the mum’s emotional state: when mothers express more positive emotions their brain becomes much more strongly connected with their baby’s brain. This may help the baby to learn and its brain to develop. 

When mice learn to do a new task, their brain activities change over time as they advance from ‘novice’ to ‘expert.’ The changes are reflected in the wiring of cell circuits and activities of neurons.

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We've seen a smart arm bracelet that can predict nightly seizures, but now a pair of researchers have created something even more promising: an AI system that can predict epileptic seizures with 99.6-percent accuracy. Even better, it can do so up to an hour before they occur. As IEEE Spectrum reports, that gives people enough time to prepare for the attack by taking medication.

The mind-reading tech works without brain implants.

A brain receptor believed to be linked to negative moods has been discovered in a part of the brain that contributes to pain. The paper is published in Science.

If you ever wondered what’s going on in your friends’ brains when they think about you, new research may provide a clue. It turns out that the brain activity patterns found in your friends’ brains when they consider your personality traits may be remarkably similar to what is found in your brain when you think of yourself, the study suggests.

Thanks to Facebook and Elon Musk, our brains and thoughts may no longer be private anymore.