Neuroscience

For decades, researchers have debated whether brain cells called astrocytes can signal like neurons. Researchers recently published the best evidence yet that some astrocytes are part of the electrical conversation.

New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.

Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary relationships.

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults.

Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon.

New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.”

Researchers uncover striking parallels in the ways that humans and machine learning models acquire language skills.

In all bilaterally symmetrical animals, from humans down to simple worms, nerves cross from one side of the body to the opposite side of the brain. Geometry may explain why.