#neural-oscillations

#neural-oscillations

Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.

To characterize CREs and TFs for neocortical ExNs, we used Arpp21-Gfp or Fezf2-Gfp transgenic mice and enriched GFP-expressing neocortical upper layer (L2-4) intratelencephalic (IT) neurons or deep layer (L5-6) predominantly extratelencephalic (ET) neurons, respectively, from neonatal mice (postnatal day (PD) 0), an age at which neocortical ExN identity and connectivity are established.

By directly recording brain activity, our study shows, for the first time in humans, that even a single bout of exercise can rapidly alter the neural rhythms and brain networks involved in memory and cognitive function.

Our eyes—which we usually think of as purely visual organs—spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear, says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Using a high-speed eye-tracking system, Du and her team were stunned to discover nonmusicians instinctively blinking in sync with the beat structure of Bach chorales.

They created an artificial 'mental map', with pleasantness along one axis and bodily reactions along the other, and charted how the brain responded while watching clips from films. The results revealed clear groupings in the way that our brains represent emotion - with guilt, anger and disgust in one corner and happiness, satisfaction and pride in the other.

The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that's the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression? The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you'll be far more persuasive than you've ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.

Wooden spoons as microphones, siblings spinning in socks across the floor, a mother laughing as Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" fills the room for the third time in a row-this is love. Long before children understand romance, they learn connection this way, through synchronized movement, shared joy, and the safety of familiar songs. Research on rhythm and social bonding suggests that moving in time together can regulate the nervous system and strengthen feelings of connection.

At CES 2026, French neuroscience brand Naox unveiled Naox Wave, EEG wireless earbuds that capture brain activity as users work, sleep, and exercise. Naox Wave earbuds The Naox Wave platform is designed to put brain-tracking technology into products people already use each day. Naox designed its earbuds and respective platform for further integration within other existing true wireless earbuds on the market.

According to University of Michigan neuroscientists, not only can their AI vision language model diagnose neurological disorders from MRI scans with high performance accuracy, but it also has foundation model capabilities, making it a flexible, general-purpose solution that can be tailored for a wide variety of medical imaging. "These results demonstrate that Prima has foundation model properties, and reported performance will continue to improve with additional health system training data and larger compute budgets," wrote the study's authors in the preprint.

They then used emerging mathematical methods to isolate signals originating from nine brain regions previously implicated in mediating consciousness and examined connections between pairs of these regions. Among them were the parietal cortex, which is at the top of the brain about halfway between the forehead and the back of the skull; the occipital cortex, at the back of the head; and several small, deeper structures, such as one called the thalamus.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).

When I first read that, I was skeptical. But after trying it myself and digging deeper into the studies, the mechanisms started making sense. When we actively look for things to appreciate, we're essentially rewiring our brain's default mode. Instead of scanning for threats and problems (which our brains love to do), we're training it to notice the good stuff. It's like changing the channel from a disaster documentary to something that doesn't spike your cortisol.

Rumination activates the default mode network (DMN) - the brain's self-referential processing system. This is the neural circuitry that fires when you're thinking about yourself in relation to others: your identity, your social standing, your mistakes. It's the brain asking, over and over, What does this say about me?

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

Neuroscientist Karen Konkoly is a lucid dreamer. When she's asleep and immersed in a dream, she knows that she is, in fact, dreaming. One of her favorite things to do during these sleep sojourns is pose personal, even existential questions - probing the mysterious terrain of her own subconscious mind. Asa researcher who studies the human mind, Konkoly has read many scientific papers positing different explanations for why humans dream - and she's made it her mission to rigorously test them.

The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

Did someone with spatial-sequence synaesthesia design the calendar app on mobile phones? Because that's how time and dates look in my brain. If you say a date to me, that day appears in a grid diagram in my head, and it shows if that box is already imprinted with a holiday, event or someone's birthday. Public holidays and special events like Christmas and Easter are already imprinted for the year, and the diagram goes backwards to about 100,000BC

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.

It felt like a superpower, this ability to keep all those plates spinning at once. But here's the uncomfortable truth I discovered: that superpower was actually my kryptonite. Every time I thought I was being ultra-productive by doing three things at once, my brain was secretly running a marathon just to keep up with the constant switching. The result? Everything took longer, contained more mistakes, and left me mentally exhausted by lunch.

There was a group of neurons that predicted the wrong answer, yet they kept getting stronger as the model learned. So we went back to the original macaque data, and the same signal was there, hiding in plain sight. It wasn't a quirk of the model - the monkeys' brains were doing it too. Even as their performance improved, both the real and simulated brains maintained a reserve of neurons that continued to predict the incorrect answer.