In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint […]
Most neurons have many branching extensions called dendrites that receive input from thousands of other neurons. Dendrites aren’t just passive information-carriers, however. According to a new study from MIT, they appear to play a surprisingly large role in neurons’ ability to translate incoming signals into electrical activity. Neuroscientists had previously suspected that dendrites might be […]
When making a complex decision, we often break the problem down into a series of smaller decisions. For example, when deciding how to treat a patient, a doctor may go through a hierarchy of steps — choosing a diagnostic test, interpreting the results, and then prescribing a medication. Making hierarchical decisions is straightforward when the […]
MIT neuroscientists have performed the most rigorous testing yet of computational models that mimic the brain’s visual cortex. Using their current best model of the brain’s visual neural network, the researchers designed a new way to precisely control individual neurons and populations of neurons in the middle of that network. In an animal study, the […]
As part of our Ask the Brain series, Anna Ivanova, a graduate student who studies how the brain processes language in the labs of Nancy Kanwisher and Evelina Fedorenko, answers the question, “Can we think without language?” _____ Imagine a woman – let’s call her Sue. One day Sue gets a stroke that destroys large […]
Ed Boyden has been elected to join the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The organization, established by an act of Congress during the height of the Civil War, was founded to provide independent and objective advice on scientific matters to the nation, and is actively engaged in furthering science in the United States. Each year […]
The following news is adapted from a press release issued in conjunction with Harvard Medical School. Charles R. Broderick, an alumnus of MIT and Harvard University, has made gifts to both alma maters to support fundamental research into the effects of cannabis on the brain and behavior. The gifts, totaling $9 million, represent the largest […]
The following post is adapted from a story featured in a recent Brain Scan newsletter. Machine vision systems are more and more common in everyday life, from social media to self-driving cars, but training artificial neural networks to “see” the world as we do—distinguishing cyclists from signposts—remains challenging. Will artificial neural networks ever decode the […]
