Together, these findings provide one of the clearest views yet of the brain’s microscopic “language circuitry.” Rather than language emerging from a single language center, it appears to arise from vast networks of specialized neurons working together across multiple scales—from individual cells, to local neural populations, to entire brain regions.

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

India’s new brainstem atlas offers scientists an unprecedented map of one of the brain’s least known regions.

While exploring the world around them, both humans and other animals continuously interpret information they pick up with their sight, hearing, touch and other senses. Neuroscience research suggests that the brain does not individually process every single sensory experience, but rather organizes information into mental models known as internal representations.

Internal representations can help recognize familiar patterns or relationships between different stimuli and experiences. While many past studies have explored the role of these perceptual “maps,” fewer have looked at how stimuli are represented in the brains of different species and how they influence learning and decision-making.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recently carried out experiments aimed at better understanding how humans and mice perceive, mentally represent and distinguish the same sounds. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that sounds are organized similarly in the human and mouse brain, but also that auditory maps tend to remain surprisingly stable during learning and decision-making.