Mark Harnett, an associate professor at MIT, still remembers the first time he saw electrical activity spiking from a living neuron. He was a senior at Reed College and had spent weeks building a patch clamp rig — an experimental setup with an electrode that can be used to gently probe a neuron and measure […]
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A new way of imaging the brain with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not directly detect neural activity as originally reported, according to scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The method, first described in 2022, generated excitement within the neuroscience community as a potentially transformative approach. But a study from the lab of […]
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On the surface, the movement disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the cognitive disorder frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which underlies frontotemporal dementia, manifest in very different ways. In addition, they are known to primarily affect very different regions of the brain. However, doctors and scientists have noted several similarities […]
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A new study of people who speak many languages has found that there is something special about how the brain processes their native language. In the brains of these polyglots — people who speak five or more languages — the same language regions light up when they listen to any of the languages that they […]
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