Recognizing his research advancing understanding of how the brain changes with experience by altering the strength of connections among neurons, a phenomenon called “synaptic plasticity,” the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) recently named Mark Bear, Picower Professor at MIT, a co-recipient of the 2023 Julius Axelrod Prize. The prize honors scientists with distinguished achievements in the broad field […]
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Spanning computer science, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, neuroscience, and other disciplines, presenters at MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative Symposium Oct. 23 delivered a rich and diverse sampling of the university’s research to address a major global problem: neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). “We still don’t completely understand the mechanism underlying the […]
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Human sensory systems are very good at recognizing objects that we see or words that we hear, even if the object is upside down or the word is spoken by a voice we’ve never heard. Computational models known as deep neural networks can be trained to do the same thing, correctly identifying an image of […]
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Hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from a vision condition called amblyopia, or lazy eye, with imbalanced vision in their two eyes. Unless this disabling condition is caught and treated at a young age, it’s rare for children to regain full vision, because the brain learns to turn off the input from the “lazy” […]
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Because figuring out what is new and what is familiar in what we see is such a critically important ability for prioritizing our attention, neuroscientists have spent decades trying to figure out how our brains are typically so good at it. Along the way they’ve made key observations that seem outright contradictory, but a new […]
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A new MIT study that focuses on a single cell in one of nature’s simplest nervous systems provides an in-depth illustration of how individual neurons can use multiple means to drive complex behaviors. In the C. elegans worm, which only has 302 nerve cells, the neuron HSN releases several chemicals and makes multiple connections along its length […]
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“I recently exhaled a breath I’ve been holding in for nearly half my life. After applying over a decade ago, I’m finally an American. This means so many things to me. Foremost, it means I can go back to the the Middle East, and see my mama and the family, for the first time in […]
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Neurons are talkers. They each communicate with fellow neurons, muscles, or other cells by releasing neurotransmitter chemicals at “synapse” junctions, ultimately producing functions ranging from emotions to motions. But even neurons of the exact same type can vary in their conversational style. A new open-access study in Cell Reports by neurobiologists at The Picower Institute for Learning […]
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Over a decade ago, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko asked 48 English speakers to complete tasks like reading sentences, recalling information, solving math problems, and listening to music. As they did this, she scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see which circuits were activated. If, as linguists have proposed for decades, language is […]
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Neuroscience discoveries ranging from the nature of memory to treatments for disease have depended on reading the minds of mice, so researchers need to truly understand what the rodents’ behavior is telling them during experiments. In a new study that examines learning from reward, MIT researchers deciphered some initially mystifying mouse behavior, yielding new ideas […]
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Though drug developers have achieved some progress in treating Alzheimer’s disease with medicines that reduce amyloid-beta protein, other problems of the disease, including inflammation, continue unchecked. In a new study, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT describe a candidate drug that in human cell cultures and Alzheimer’s mouse models reduced […]
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Kimberly Rose Bennett, a PhD candidate in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), has been selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to be one of the 50 Gilliam Fellows for 2023. Bennett is the first HST student to receive this prestigious fellowship. The […]
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Figuring out how hundreds of different kinds of brain cells develop from their unique expression of thousands of genes promises to not only advance understanding of how the brain works in health, but also what goes wrong in disease. A new MIT study that precisely probes this “molecular logic” in two neuron types of the Drosophila fruit […]
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Artificial neural networks, ubiquitous machine-learning models that can be trained to complete many tasks, are so called because their architecture is inspired by the way biological neurons process information in the human brain. About six years ago, scientists discovered a new type of more powerful neural network model known as a transformer. These models can […]
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