News

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.

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.

Bryan Baxter and Dara Manoach share a new study on the brain basis of motor learning. When learning a typing task, epilepsy patients show higher rates of “hippocampal ripples”--an electrical activity pattern in the brain associated with memory formation--during brief rest breaks than during the typing itself. These ‘offline’ ripples predict gains in speed, suggesting that ripples contribute to motor learning during wakeful rest.

Until recently, the quest to build high-resolution maps of brains — otherwise known as “connectomes” — was stymied by the slow pace and cost of powerful electron microscopes capable of systematically capturing neuroanatomy down to billionths of a meter. But now a team of scientists at Harvard and MIT have found a way to bypass that bottleneck: using machine learning to guide a simpler, less-expensive variety of microscope in real time. 

In the largest and most detailed analysis to date of how genes influence mental illness, new research from a team led by Jordan Smoller and colleagues, working in collaboration with the international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Cross-Disorder Working Group, finds that distinct psychiatric disorders have more in common biologically than previously believed.

Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.