Brains

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

Eve Marder’s research into the plasticity and resilience of nervous systems finds universal principles guiding life’s responses to stress.

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.

By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more.

While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent priority, biologists also learned more about how brains process information, how to define individuality and why sleep deprivation kills.

Deep neural networks, often criticized as “black boxes,” are helping neuroscientists understand the organization of living brains.

New research links serotonin and dopamine not just to addiction and depression, but to the ability to control genes.