A newly published hypothesis suggests that human eyes evolved from a single “third eye” on an ancient ancestor’s head. This proposed evolutionary detour would explain why vertebrate vision is unique, leaving a functional remnant inside our brains.
Category: neuroscience
GD2 CAR T Cells Show Promise Against DMG
In a small clinical trial, a CAR T-cell therapy—a type of immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer—shrank tumors in several children and young adults with diffuse midline gliomas. This fast-growing form of brain and spinal cord cancer typically causes death within a year of diagnosis.
In the trial, several participants were still alive 2 years or more after receiving the treatment.
Patients in the trial had a type of diffuse midline gliomas known as H3K27M mutant, a genetic change that is found in about 80% of younger patients with these cancers Exit Disclaimer. Researchers at Stanford University, who led the study, designed the experimental CAR T-cell therapy to target a molecule called GD2 that is produced in large amounts by H3K27M-mutant diffuse midline gliomas.
Team finds brain circuit that helps you switch gears
A new study shows how the brain abandons outdated strategies and adapts to new rules.
Most people have experienced the feeling: switching from one task to another, only to find the brain momentarily stuck in the old mode of thinking. Sometimes, even after realizing a strategy no longer works, the mind keeps returning to it anyway.
Neuroscientists call the ability to adapt and shift strategies “cognitive flexibility”—a core feature of higher cognition that allows the brain to abandon outdated rules and respond to changing conditions. Impairments in cognitive flexibility are associated with disorders including Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Scientists Built A Disturbingly Accurate AI Brain Simulation
Insights from the Algonauts 2025 Winners.
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.10784v1
A foundation model of vision, audition, and language for in-silico neuroscience.
https://ai.meta.com/research/publicat…
How to breathe life back into brain theory.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158…
A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
#ai #tech #explained #brain #artificialintelligence
Reading brachycephalic dogs’ facial expressions requires extra cognitive processing by humans
People often look to dogs’ behavior, especially their facial expressions, for indications of their states of mind. Numerous studies show that this is a popular interpretation strategy. However, modern dog breeds vary greatly in size and structure, and few studies have explored how breed-specific morphology might affect humans’ ability to assess visual cues from the faces of different breeds of dogs.
Now, for the first time, a collaborative research team including scientists from Israel, Czechia, and Hungary has used eye-tracking to compare the visual attention patterns of humans observing photographs of normocephalic and brachycephalic dogs. A research paper detailing the team’s findings appears in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
Hidden brain circuit could explain how movement errors sharpen new skills
While humans are acquiring new skills that entail performing coordinated movements, such as walking, playing an instrument or skateboarding, their brains are known to continuously detect mistakes and correct movements over time. This gradual acquisition of task-specific movements is known as motor learning.
Past neuroscience studies suggest that a brain region known as the cerebellum plays a central role in motor learning. The cerebellum is a structure at the back of the brain that contributes to coordination, balancing the timing of voluntary actions and the execution of precise movements.
This brain structure hosts a type of nerve cell known as Purkinje cells (PCs), which receive input information via climbing fibers (CFs), nerve fibers that originate from a lower region in the brainstem. Neuroscientists have hypothesized that climbing fibers also carry signals that instruct the brain to adapt to movements based on earlier mistakes.
Why ‘football’ beats ‘shamrock’ when your brain is dismantling every word at lightning speed
Before you even know what a word means, your brain is already playing a rapid-fire game of linguistic LEGO. Discover how our minds secretly dissect words, piece by orthographic piece, in the blink of an eye.
Imagine catching a flash of the word football on a screen. Before you even register its meaning (“a game” or “a ball”), your brain may have already parsed it into “foot” + “ball.” A clever new experiment used red-and-blue anaglyph glasses and split-second word flashes to probe this. It found that real compound words (like football) are recognized much faster than lookalikes (like shamrock), suggesting our eyes and brain latch onto word form almost instantly.
In the lab, volunteers wore 3D-style red/blue glasses while words appeared for just 60 milliseconds under a mask. Each word was painted half red and half blue, splitting it either at a meaningful break or in the middle of a syllable. For example, “FOOT” might be blue and “BALL” red, or vice versa, sending “foot” to one hemisphere and “ball” to the other. Participants then quickly reported if what they saw was a real word or a made-up one.
The nocebo effect: How prior experience and verbal suggestion rewire the brain to make pain worse
Researchers have a better understanding of the nocebo effect and the neuroscience behind it all. Opposite of the better-known placebo effect, where positive expectations trigger genuine pain relief, the nocebo effect is the experience from negative expectations, created by prior experience, verbal suggestion, or social observation, which can drive anxiety and make pain worse.
A new study published in Nature Communications, by researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga and McGill University, identified a brain pathway through which negative expectations can amplify pain. The findings, generated independently by the two labs without prior coordination, converged on the neurochemical cholecystokinin (CCK), which has previously been linked to nocebo pain responses in humans.
The researchers identified a specific brain pathway through which CCK acts, traveling from the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region involved in the emotional dimensions of pain, to a midbrain structure called the lateral periaqueductal gray (lPAG), where it increases pain sensitivity.
