Category Archives: Uncategorized

Abstract: “The neurobiological mechanisms underlying the induction and remission of depressive episodes over time are not well understood. Through repeated longitudinal imaging of medial prefrontal microcircuits in the living brain, we found that prefrontal spinogenesis plays a critical role in … Continue reading →

Abbreviated abstract: Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for a number of reasons. Studying a very large number of subjects, the authors  provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability … Continue reading →

Summary: Noninvasive delivery of alternating electrical currents to temporal and prefrontal brain regions improves working memory and reverses age-related changes in brain dynamics in the elderly, report Reinhart and Nguyen in Nature Neuroscience (22):820–827(2019). They also report a similar effect … Continue reading →

Summary: “Depression is a mental illness characterized by episodes of a sad, despondent mood and/or a loss of interest or pleasure. This pathology affects nearly 20% of the population in the United States, and treatments are limited. Indeed, in the … Continue reading →

Abstract: “A critical period is a developmental epoch during which the nervous system is expressly sensitive to specific environmental stimuli that are required for proper circuit organization and learning. Mechanistic characterization of critical periods has revealed an important role for … Continue reading →

Summary: “When choosing whether to act altruistically, people may compare the current option to an idiosyncratic ideal. Prosocial individuals seem to represent deviations from that ideal in the amygdala, but selfish individuals do not. Oxytocin administration makes selfish individuals look … Continue reading →

Abstract: “Light plays a pivotal role in the regulation of affective behaviors. However, the precise circuits that mediate the impact of light on depressive-like behaviors are not well understood. Here, we show that light influences depressive-like behaviors through a disynaptic circuit linking the retina and … Continue reading →

“’Enriched environments’ are a key experimental paradigm to decipher how interactions between genes and environment change the structure and function of the brain across the lifespan of an animal. The regulation of adult hippocampal neurogenesis by environmental enrichment is a … Continue reading →

Abstract: “Synapse density is reduced in postmortem cortical tissue from schizophrenia patients, which is suggestive of increased synapse elimination. Using a reprogrammed in vitro model of microglia-mediated synapse engulfment, we demonstrate increased synapse elimination in patient-derived neural cultures and isolated … Continue reading →

Abstract: “Sleep is integral to life. Although insufficient or disrupted sleep increases the risk of multiple pathological conditions, including cardiovascular disease, we know little about the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which sleep maintains cardiovascular health. Here we report that … Continue reading →