Brains

How does experience alter our perceptions? This adapted book excerpt from We Know It When We See It describes how the brain’s visual system rewires itself to make the best use of its neural resources.

Faced with a decision, the brain weighs its options by bundling them into rapidly alternating cycles of brain waves.

Collaborations in progress between ethicists and biologists seek to head off challenges raised by lab-grown “organoids” as they become increasingly similar to human brain tissue.

The dendritic arms of some human neurons can perform logic operations that once seemed to require whole neural networks.

An organized tide of brain waves, blood and spinal fluid pulsing through a sleeping brain may flush away neural toxins that cause Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

New studies help to explain how microbes in the gut can shape a host’s fear responses.

While we sleep, one kind of slow brain wave helps to reinforce memories, but a competing wave weakens them.

Mathematicians and neuroscientists have created the first anatomically accurate model that explains how vision is possible.

New experimental results simultaneously advance and challenge the theory that the brain’s network of neurons balances on the knife-edge between two phases.