Rémy Furrer and Amanda Merner share the results of a survey of 1,052 U.S. adults, which found that neurotechnologies targeting motor symptoms were viewed as more acceptable and beneficial than those for mood or memory symptoms. Non-surgical options like transcranial magnetic stimulation were generally preferred over invasive ones such as deep brain stimulation.

The fight against addiction is a fight against memory. Junghyup (Jung) Suh shares findings that the relapse circuit in alcohol addiction consists of two separate “wires” or outputs coming out of the basolateral amygdala, a key brain region for emotional memories. One wire is responsible for forming the addiction memory, and the other for triggering alcohol-seeking behavior. This precise mapping opens the door for potentially more targeted treatment approaches to relapse in the future.

New research reveals that acute and chronic insults both reshape how pain signals are sent to the brain, but through distinct mechanisms. By using long-term calcium imaging in mice, researchers from the Woolf lab tracked the same spinal cord neurons over time and found that acute pain temporarily increases sensitivity, while chronic nerve injury recruits a previously ‘silent’ group of neurons – offering a potential key to understanding chronic pain.