With a full mouse connectome on the horizon, neuroscience needs to overcome its legacy of minimalism and embrace the contemporary challenge of representing whole-nervous-system connectivity.
Category: neuroscience – Page 41
Ancient Andes society used hallucinogens to strengthen social order, snuff tubes suggest
Two thousand years before the Inca empire dominated the Andes, a lesser-known society known as the Chavín Phenomenon shared common art, architecture, and materials throughout modern-day Peru. Through agricultural innovations, craft production, and trade, Chavín shaped a growing social order and laid the foundations for a hierarchical society among the high peaks.
But one of their most powerful tools wasn’t farming. It was access to altered states of consciousness.
That’s according to a new study that uncovered the earliest-known direct evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in the Peruvian Andes. A team of archaeologists from the University of Florida, Stanford University and South American institutions discovered ancient snuff tubes carved from hollow bones at the heart of monumental stone structures at Chavín de Huántar, a prehistoric ceremonial site in the mountains of Peru.
Glymphatics and meningeal lymphatics unlock the brain-immune code
Recent discoveries of glymphatics and meningeal lymphatics have redefined our understanding of CNS immunosurveillance. Kim and Kipnis illustrate how the clearance of brain-derived antigens creates an “immune code” that, when presented by meningeal antigen-presenting cells, instructs T cells to safeguard neural homeostasis. They review how inflammation, aging, and neurodegeneration disrupt this finely tuned process and highlight emerging therapeutic opportunities.
Large-scale study explores lifespan changes in the human brain’s functional connectivity
From birth to the last moments of life, the human brain is known to change and evolve significantly, both in terms of its physical organization (i.e., structural connectivity) and the coordination between different brain regions (i.e., functional connectivity). Mapping and understanding the brain’s evolution over time is of crucial importance, as it could also shed light on differences in the brains of individuals who develop various mental health disorders or experience an aging-related cognitive decline.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University and other institutes in China recently carried out a large-scale study to gather new insights into how the brain’s functional connectivity of humans worldwide changes over the course of their lifespan. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, unveils patterns in the evolution of the brain that could inform future research focusing on a wide range of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders.
“Functional connectivity of the human brain changes through life,” wrote Lianglong Sun, Tengda Zhao and their colleagues in their paper. “We assemble task-free functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 33,250 individuals at 32 weeks of postmenstrual age to 80 years from 132 global sites.”
Children as young as 5 can navigate a ‘tiny town’: New insights into how the brain develops navigational skills
Many behavioral studies suggest that using landmarks to navigate through large-scale spaces—known as map-based navigation—is not established until around age 12.
A neuroscience study at Emory University counters that assumption. Through experiments combining brain scans and a virtual environment the researchers dubbed Tiny Town, they showed that five-year-olds have a brain system that supports map-based navigation.
The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the finding, the first neural evidence that this cognitive ability is in place in such young children.
How does consciousness work? Duelling scientists tested two big theories but found no winner
“Theories are like toothbrushes,” it’s sometimes said. “Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use anybody else’s.”
It’s a joke, but when it comes to the study of consciousness – the question of how we have a subjective experience of anything at all – it’s not too far from the truth.
In 2022, British neuroscientist Anil Seth and I published a review listing 22 theories based in the biology of the brain. In 2024, operating with a less restrictive scope, US public intellectual Robert Kuhn counted more than 200.
One protein mitigates Huntington’s disease, and one exacerbates it
A decade ago, University at Buffalo researchers shed some light on an enduring neuroscience mystery: How exactly does a mutated huntingtin protein (HTT) cause Huntington’s disease?
They found that HTT is something like a traffic controller inside neurons, moving different cargo along neuronal highways called axons in concert with other proteins that are key for cellular function and survival. Reduce the amount of non-mutant HTT and you’ll create the neurological equivalent of traffic jams and roadblocks.
Now, the researchers have learned more about what can control the traffic-controlling HTT.