Visual art has found many ways of representing objects, from the ornate Baroque period to modernist simplicity. Artificial visual systems are somewhat analogous: from relatively simple beginnings inspired by key regions in the visual cortex, recent advances in performance have seen increasing complexity. “Our overall goal has been to build an accurate, engineering-level model of […]
Repetitive movements such as nail-biting and pacing are very often seen in humans and animals under the influence of habit-forming drugs. Studies at the McGovern Institute have found that these repetitive behaviors may be due to a breakdown in communication between neurons in the striatum – a deep brain region linked to habit and movement, […]
Did you know that you can collect brain activity data, with sub-millisecond precision, right here on campus? Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, is a noninvasive technique for measuring neuronal activity in the human brain. Invented at MIT and now housed within the Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute, MEG is available to MIT users and beyond. […]
As we reach milestones in time, it’s common to look back and review what we learned. A number of media outlets, including National Geographic, NPR, The Hill, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Nature, Mental Floss, CNBC, and others, recognized the profound impact of genome editing, adding CRISPR to their discovery of the decade lists. “In 2013, […]
Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, has been named this year’s winner of the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience. The award, given annually by the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), recognizes individuals “whose distinguished research is at the cutting-edge of their discipline with realized or future potential, to […]
Mood and attentional disorders amongst teens are an increasing concern, for parents, society, and for peers. A recent Pew research center survey found conditions such as depression and anxiety to be the number one concern that young students had about their friends, ranking above drugs or bullying. “We’re seeing an epidemic in teen anxiety and […]
Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 1:00 pm McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT Singleton Auditorium, 46-3002 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA Join us for an afternoon symposium featuring the following speakers: Sydney Cash | Massachusetts General Hospital Human Brain Tissue in the Laboratory – Promises, Procedures and Problems Michael E. Greenberg | Harvard Medical […]
Many debilitating conditions like depression and addiction have biological signatures hidden in the brain well before symptoms appear. What if brain scans could be used to detect these hidden signatures and determine the most optimal treatment for each individual? McGovern Investigator John Gabrieli is interested in this question and wrote about the use of imaging […]
Malinda McPherson is a graduate student in Josh McDermott‘s lab, studying how people hear pitch (how high or low a sound is) in both speech and music. To test the extent to which human audition varies across cultures, McPherson travels with the McDermott lab to Bolivia to study the Tsimane’ — a native Amazonian society […]