Neuroscience News

Neuroscientists Identify Five Major Epochs of Brain Structure over Course of Human Life

Mousley et al. compared the brains of 3,802 people between zero and ninety years old using datasets of MRI diffusion scans, which map neural connections by tracking how water molecules move through brain tissue. Image credit: Mousley et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-65974-8.
Dec 2, 2025 by News Staff

Neuroscientists have detected five broad phases of brain structure in the average human life, split up by four pivotal turning points between birth and death when our brains reconfigure. Childhood brain topology runs from birth until a turning point at the age of nine, when it transitions to the adolescent phase — an era that lasts right up to the age of 32, on average. Our early thirties see the brain’s neural wiring shift into adult mode;...

read more...
Maldarelli & Güntürkün show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this. Image credit: Kutte.

Birds May Possess Fundamental Forms of Conscious Perception: Study

Nov 25, 2025 by News Staff

In their new paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Ruhr University Bochum researchers Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün...

Scholars argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of the Universe. Image credit: NASA / ESA / JPL-Caltech / STScI / Sci-News.com.

There Are Three Types of Phenomenal Consciousness, Researchers Say

Nov 24, 2025 by News Staff

Our conscious experience makes up our lives, often through positive pleasure: I feel the warm Sun on my skin, I hear the singing of birds, I enjoy the...

Lead exposure to humans in modern times versus our ancestors. Image credit: J. Gregory / Mount Sinai Health System.

Lead Exposure May Have Influenced Evolution of Human Brain, Behavior, and Development of Language

Oct 20, 2025 by News Staff

Several hominids — Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, early Homo sp., Gigantopithecus blacki, Pongo sp., Papio sp., Homo neanderthalensis,...

White matter degenerating microglia are a novel therapeutic target to potentially reduce the impact of white matter injury and myelin loss on the progression of cognitive impairment. Image credit: Miroslaw Miras.

Researchers Develop Self-Administered Digital Test for Diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease

Sep 15, 2025 by News Staff

A proof-of-concept study by a team of Lund University scientists shows that their brief, self-administered digital cognitive test — named BioCog...

Anauralia is the phenomenon of an absence of auditory sensory imagery -- not hearing anything in one’s inner ear. Image credit: Vat Loai.

Study: Signals from Visual Areas of Human Brain Can Reveal Colors Observer is Seeing

Sep 10, 2025 by News Staff

Does a given color elicit comparable neural activity in two different observers? Do colors elicit area-specific response patterns? To address these questions,...

Sleep is known to promote tissue growth and regulate metabolism, partly by enhancing growth hormone (GH) release, but the underlying circuit mechanism is unknown. Ding et al. demonstrate how GH release, which is enhanced during both rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep, is regulated by sleep-wake-dependent activity of distinct hypothalamic neurons expressing GH-releasing hormone (GHRH) and somatostatin (SST). SST neurons in the arcuate nucleus suppress GH release by inhibiting nearby GHRH neurons that stimulate GH release, whereas periventricular SST neurons inhibit GH release by projecting to the median eminence. GH release is associated with strong surges of both GHRH and SST activity during REM sleep but moderately increased GHRH and decreased SST activity during NREM sleep. Furthermore, Ding et al. identified a negative feedback pathway in which GH enhances the excitability of locus coeruleus neurons and increases wakefulness. Image credit: Ding et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.039.

Animal Study Sheds New Light on How Sleep and Growth Hormone Regulation Interact

Sep 9, 2025 by News Staff

Neuroscientists from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University have explored brain circuits that control growth hormone release during...

People who walk a lot have less back pain than people who do not walk much -- and the volume is what matters most, not the intensity. Image credit: Tung Lam.

Regular Walking May Reduce Risk of Chronic Low Back Pain

Sep 5, 2025 by News Staff

In a new study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, daily walking volume and walking intensity were inversely associated with the risk of chronic...

Kartar et al. suggest that circuitries supporting the integration of interoceptive representations and processing of affective memories are putative neurobiological substrates of HVB-induced ASCs. Image credit: Ram Jain.

Study: Breathwork While Listening to Music May Induce Blissful State in Practitioners

Sep 1, 2025 by News Staff

In a new study, high ventilation breathwork while listening to music was associated with reports of blissful states and reduced negative emotions, accompanied...

Memories of navigating familiar paths are more fluid than previously thought, activating different neurons with each journey. Image credit: Zeinab Vessal.

Memories Drift across Neurons over Time, Animal Study Suggests

Jul 30, 2025 by News Staff

The brain’s internal GPS changes each time mice navigate a familiar, static environment, according to a new study by neurobiologists from Northwestern...

Scholars argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of the Universe. Image credit: NASA / ESA / JPL-Caltech / STScI / Sci-News.com.

Seven-Year Experiment Uncovers New Insights into Nature of Consciousness

May 1, 2025 by News Staff

A multinational team of neuroscientists has tested two competing theories of consciousness: the integrated information theory (IIT) and the global neuronal...

Postigo et al. aim to see if neurons can transport light like fiber-optic communications channels. Image credit: Gemini AI.

Scientists Investigating Whether Neurons Can Transmit Light through Their Axons

Apr 30, 2025 by News Staff

Neurons communicate by firing electrical pulses, but scientists have found hints that neurons may transmit light as well. Researchers at the University...

Babies are able to learn abstract relations before the first year of life. Image credit: Kang Heungbo.

Why Don’t We Remember Specific Events from Our First Years of Life?

Mar 24, 2025 by News Staff

Challenging assumptions about infant memory, a new Yale University-led study shows that infants as young as 12 months old can encode memories. The findings...

Klingons at San Diego Comic-Con 2014. Image credit: Chris Favero / CC BY-SA 2.0.

Klingon and Other Conlangs are Processed by Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages: Study

Mar 18, 2025 by News Staff

What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines — from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology....

Positions of electrodes used to cover the superior auricular muscles. Image credit: Schroeer et al., doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1462507.

Auricular Muscles Scientists Thought We Didn’t Use Actually Activate When We Listen Hard

Jan 31, 2025 by News Staff

If you can wiggle your ears, you can use the auricular muscles, which helped our distant ancestors listen closely. These muscles helped change the shape...

An anatomical illustration from Johannes Sobotta’s Human Anatomy, 1908.

New Study Highlights Role of Gene Expression in Human Brain Evolution

Jan 2, 2025 by News Staff

University of California, Santa Barbara’s Professor Soojin Yi and colleagues aimed to determine how genes in different types of brain cells have evolved...

A Homo heidelbergensis, a Neanderthal and a Cro-Magnon. Image credit: SINC / José Antonio Peñas.

Increases in Brain Size Occurred within Human Lineages Comprising Single Species, New Study Reveals

Nov 29, 2024 by News Staff

New research by scientists from the University of Reading and the University of Durham shows that encephalization (i.e., relative brain size increase)...

The versatility of somatosensation arises from heterogeneous dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons. However, soma transcriptomes of individual human (h)DRG neurons -- critical information to decipher their functions -- are lacking due to technical difficulties. In their new study, Yu et al. isolated somata from individual hDRG neurons and conducted deep RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to detect, on average, over 9,000 unique genes per neuron, and they identified 16 neuronal types.

Neuroscientists Identify 16 Neuronal Types Involved in Human Sense of Touch

Nov 6, 2024 by News Staff

New research led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, Karolinska Institute and Linköping University provides a landscape view of the human...

Kutter et al. discovered that individual nerve cells in the medial temporal lobe recognize zero as a numerical value and not as a separate category ‘nothing.’

New Research Sheds Light on How Human Brain Processes Number Zero

Sep 25, 2024 by News Staff

The number zero holds a special status among numbers, indispensable for developing a comprehensive number theory. Despite its importance in mathematics,...

To track the spatial tuning of neurons dynamically during offline states, Maboudi et al. used a new Bayesian learning approach based on the spike-triggered average decoded position in ensemble recordings from freely moving rats.

Some Dreams May, in Fact, Predict Future, Neuroscientists Say

Jun 12, 2024 by News Staff

University of Michigan anesthesiologist Kamran Diba and colleagues have found that during sleep, some neurons not only replay the recent past but also...

© 2011-2025. Sci.News. All Rights Reserved. | Back to top