Schizophrenia, a brain disorder that produces hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive impairments, usually strikes during adolescence or young adulthood. While some signs can suggest that a person is at high risk for developing the disorder, there is no way to definitively diagnose it until the first psychotic episode occurs. MIT neuroscientists working with researchers at Beth […]
During the Klondike Gold Rush, thousands of prospectors climbed Alaska’s dangerous Chilkoot Pass in search of riches. McGovern scientists are exploring how a once-overlooked part of the brain might be at the root of cost-benefit decisions like these. McGovern researchers are studying how the brain balances risk and reward to make decisions. Is it worth […]
Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear. Among other things, this helps children establish their language’s word order, such as where subjects and verbs fall in a sentence. In computing, learning language is the task of syntactic and semantic […]
Who we are Our website address is: http://mcgovern.mit.edu. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from […]
New biography about McGovern Institute co-founder details the principles that led to McGovern’s success as a businessman and philanthropist.
A new study co-authored by McGovern researcher Michael Halassa separates changes in high- and low-level brain functions in ADHD.
Mahdi Ramadan and Alexi Choueiri’s common experiences as Lebanese evacuees led both to study the human brain as graduate students in McGovern labs.
Imagine trying to write your name so that it can be read in a mirror. Your brain has all of the visual information you need, and you’re a pro at writing your own name. Still, this task is very difficult for most people. That’s because it requires the brain to perform a mental transformation that […]
Researchers commonly study brain function by monitoring two types of electromagnetism — electric fields and light. However, most methods for measuring these phenomena in the brain are very invasive. MIT engineers have now devised a new technique to detect either electrical activity or optical signals in the brain using a minimally invasive sensor for magnetic […]
Neurons in the human brain receive electrical signals from thousands of other cells, and long neural extensions called dendrites play a critical role in incorporating all of that information so the cells can respond appropriately. Using hard-to-obtain samples of human brain tissue, MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that human dendrites have different electrical properties from […]
