Scientists have identified a brain protein that may help Alzheimer’s spread, revealing a potential new target for slowing the disease’s progression. Alzheimer’s disease is closely linked to the accumulation of a toxic form of the protein Tau inside the brain. As Tau damage reaches additional brain regions, more neurons are harmed, symptoms intensify, and the [...]Biological defenses make losing weight and keeping it off unusually difficult. Better treatments, healthier environments, and sustainable habits may support long-term health more effectively than willpower alone. For years, weight loss has been framed as a simple test of discipline: consume fewer calories and exercise more. Modern research, however, shows that body weight is regulated [...]A reverse prediction test suggests that supposedly brainlike AI models may rely on visual strategies the primate brain does not use. Artificial intelligence can sometimes predict how the brain responds when people recognize objects. But that resemblance may hide an important weakness: the internal workings of today’s vision models do not necessarily match the processes [...]Aging appears to alter how key cerebellar neurons fire, with measurable effects on movement and coordination. Aging often brings slower movement, weaker balance, and reduced agility, but the brain changes behind these losses have been difficult to identify. McGill University researchers have now directly linked declining activity in Purkinje cells, an important type of neuron [...]New study shows what happens in our brains as we track multiple conversations
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Keith Thomas can move arms and hands, and feel sensation of touch after ‘double neural bypass’ and months of training
A man who was paralysed from the chest down in a swimming accident six years ago has been able to feed himself and drink from a cup thanks to a brain implant that bypasses his spinal cord injury.
Keith Thomas of Massapequa, New York, could not lift his arms off his wheelchair when he agreed to trial the technology in 2021, but after surgery to implant electrodes in his brain and many months of training, he was able to move the limbs again.
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© Photograph: Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
© Photograph: Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
© Photograph: Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
A newly identified protein pathway may link blood-brain barrier deterioration to age-related cognitive decline. The aging brain depends on a microscopic border that works every second to keep danger out and support the nerve cells inside. When that barrier begins to fail, memory, mood, and thinking may suffer. Andrew A. Pieper, MD, PhD, and colleagues [...]Men and women performed similarly on most multitasking measures, but a difference in conversational engagement may shape how their overall ability is perceived. A person can keep cooking, search for information, and track a visual task without appearing overwhelmed. But if they stop responding during a conversation, others may quickly assume they are losing control. [...]Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have engineered Nicotiana benthamiana, a fast-growing relative of tobacco, to produce five different psychedelic compounds.
The achievement, detailed in a study published in Science Advances, brings together biosynthetic pathways that nature distributes across three different kingdoms of life.
The five compounds (DMT, psilocybin, psilocin, bufotenin, and 5-MeO-DMT) are typically sourced from an Amazonian shrub, mushrooms, and the defensive skin glands of a desert toad. Extracting even one of these molecules from its natural source is a slow process. Producing all five in a single, easily cultivated plant had not been achieved before.
Despite coming from such different sources, all five of these molecules share a common origin: tryptophan, an amino acid found in every living thing. In humans, tryptophan is the building block for serotonin, which helps explain why these psychedelics interact with serotonin receptors in the brain. This shared chemistry gave the Weizmann team, led by Dr. Paula Berman and Prof. Asaph Aharoni, a logical starting point for their experiments.
The team began by focusing on DMT to address a previously unresolved question. Researchers knew the general biochemical pathway plants use to synthesize DMT, but they had not yet identified all the genes and enzymes responsible for each step. “At the heart of the study was the challenge of making DMT,” Aharoni says.
To identify the necessary genes, the team analyzed genetic material from the Amazonian chacruna shrub and an Australian acacia species. Introducing these genes into Nicotiana benthamiana allowed the plant to produce DMT within days.
The researchers applied the same gene transfer approach to the other four psychedelics, but the engineered plants initially produced only trace amounts of 5-MeO-DMT. Protein-design specialists Prof. Sarel Fleishman and Dr. Olga Khersonsky determined that the limitation was due to a poor molecular fit in one enzyme’s active site. Replacing a single amino acid resolved the issue.
“We mutated one amino acid in the sequence and got a 40-fold increase in the production of 5-MeO-DMT,” Berman says.
Once all five biosynthetic pathways were functioning separately, the researchers combined them within a single plant. The result was a tobacco relative capable of producing DMT from plants, psilocin and psilocybin from fungi, and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT from toads, all at the same time. “In effect, we created a kind of biological ‘cocktail’ — not by mixing substances externally, but by combining the underlying pathways inside one organism,” Aharoni says.
Combining all five pathways reduced the yield of each compound, as they competed for the same pool of tryptophan. The researchers also introduced bacterial enzymes to attach chlorine and bromine atoms to the psychedelic molecules, creating modified psychedelic molecules that do not naturally occur in the engineered plant. Some similar modified molecules have shown antidepressant-like effects in previous studies.
The bottleneck also highlighted a broader research question about the natural role of these compounds. These molecules likely function as defenses or as tools for interacting with microbes and insects in the organisms that produce them, rather than evolving to affect human consciousness.
“If we can move these pathways into a model plant that grows quickly and is easy to manipulate, we can start asking what these compounds actually do for the plant,” Berman explains.
There is a clear practical benefit to this approach. Plants used for ayahuasca are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and rising demand, and the Sonoran Desert toad is declining due to overcollection and habitat destruction. A fast-growing laboratory plant capable of producing these compounds within a week provides an alternative that does not rely on harvesting wild species.
The Weizmann researchers are now working on a plant that can produce the complete ayahuasca mixture, which includes both DMT and the compound required for it to be active when taken orally. They are also exploring whether these psychedelics could be produced in edible plants capable of delivering carefully regulated doses.
Whether this platform becomes a practical manufacturing system will depend on overcoming the metabolic bottleneck that currently limits production when multiple pathways operate simultaneously.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
The developing brains of boys and girls light up differently when shown a face
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Inside the brain and aesthetic experience
The post The <i>Nautilus</i> Guide to the Best Books on the Science of Art appeared first on Nautilus.
A new study suggests that sleep habits may influence how certain genetic variants affect early brain and cognitive changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep may do more than help the brain recover from a busy day. New research suggests it could also influence how certain genes shape the earliest brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. [...]
New MRI findings may help explain brain fog and broken sleep in chronic fatigue syndrome
More than a century after Sigmund Freud developed some of his most influential—and controversial—ideas about the human mind, a new study indicates that modern neuroscience may be arriving at a surprisingly familiar destination.
Researchers at the University of Oslo argue that Freud’s concepts of projection, wish fulfillment, transference, and the unconscious may share a fundamental architecture with one of the most influential emerging theories in cognitive neuroscience: the idea that the brain is essentially a prediction machine.
Rather than passively receiving information from the world, the brain may continuously anticipate what will happen next, compare those expectations with incoming sensory information, and either revise its internal model or act to make reality conform more closely to its expectations.
In a paper published in the journal Entropy, researchers propose that this modern “predictive processing” framework may provide a neuroscientific explanation for mental processes that psychoanalysts have described from the perspective of subjective human experience for more than a century.
The researchers do not claim that neuroscience has proved Freud right. Instead, they argue that psychoanalysis and predictive processing may describe some of the same fundamental operations of the mind at two very different levels of analysis.
“The predictive processing model is a paradigm of the mind where the brain’s main task is to construct and interact with the world through predictions,” researchers write. “The world we perceive and interact with is a world that we create from our past, from expectancies and actions.”
The basic idea behind predictive processing represents a significant departure from older models of perception. Traditionally, the brain was often described as something like an information-processing machine: a stimulus arrives from the outside world, the brain processes it, and a response follows.
Predictive processing effectively turns much of that sequence around.
Under this system, the brain is constantly generating models of what it expects to encounter. Those predictions are formed by previous experiences, biological needs, and learned expectations. Incoming sensory information is then compared against the brain’s predictions.
When the two match, all is relatively well. When they do not, the discrepancy creates what neuroscientists call a prediction error.
The brain can respond in at least two broad ways. It can update its internal model to better reflect reality, a process known as perceptual inference. Or it can act on the world in ways that make reality more closely correspond to its prior prediction, a process known as active inference.
Researchers point to a familiar example: the fear of snakes. Someone who assumes snakes are dangerous may gradually revise that expectation after repeated encounters with harmless ones, eventually becoming less afraid. But if the fear is strong enough, the person may avoid snakes entirely. By never getting close enough to discover that some pose no threat, their behavior prevents the prediction from being challenged—and, in effect, helps keep the fear alive.
“To perceive is to predict, to act is to act out the prediction,” researchers explain.
According to the researchers, this framework itself bears a striking resemblance to concepts developed by Freud and later psychoanalysts.
Freud proposed that people do not experience the world as completely neutral observers. Past experiences, desires, fears, and unconscious expectations can shape how they perceive other people and events. In psychoanalytic theory, “projection” can occur when a person attributes internal feelings or expectations to someone else.
A person who feels hostility, for example, may perceive others as hostile. Someone who expects criticism because of earlier relationships may interpret ambiguous behavior as rejection. In more complex cases, people may even behave in ways that encourage others to respond as expected.
The researchers argue that this resembles a form of prediction.
In both models, past experience creates a template to understand the present. The brain—or, in psychoanalytic terminology, the mind—attempts to reduce uncertainty by making the world familiar and predictable.
That does not necessarily mean making the world pleasant.
One of the more consequential implications of the proposed connection is that people may sometimes preserve painful or destructive patterns precisely because those patterns are familiar. A predictable threat can, in some circumstances, create less uncertainty than an unfamiliar form of safety.
The researchers use the example of a woman who was frequently criticized by her mother when she was a child. As an adult, she continues to carry an internal critical voice that tells her she is not good enough. Even when praised, she may dismiss the compliment as undeserved.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, she has internalized—or “introjected”—the critical relationship. From a predictive-processing perspective, positive feedback conflicts with a deeply accepted model of what she expects from herself and others.
The result is a provocative possibility. People sometimes reject evidence that their circumstances have changed because accepting it would require the brain to rebuild its model of the world.
“The one with paranoia and the one with a self-critical inner voice minimize surprise at the cost of reality testing and psychological flexibility,” the researchers write.
The proposed connection also reaches into the “free energy principle,” a conceptual framework associated with neuroscientist Dr. Karl Friston. In simple terms, the framework describes biological systems as continually working to limit uncertainty and maintain themselves within viable states.
For the brain, unexpected information produces what researchers describe as “surprisal.” The mismatch between anticipation and reality can force the brain to do additional work, either changing its model or changing its behavior.
This may help explain why surprise can be uncomfortable and why the familiar can feel safe even when it is objectively harmful.
Freud approached a similar problem via the concept of homeostasis, although he developed his ideas before the term became widely established. The researchers argue that Freud’s concept of “perceptual identity”—the predisposition to seek or recreate perceptions associated with previously satisfying experiences—may be particularly compatible with modern predictive processing.
If researchers are correct, it could have consequences for understanding psychotherapy.
In psychoanalysis, patients may repeatedly bring expectations formed in earlier relationships into their relationship with a therapist, a phenomenon termed transference. Someone accustomed to abandonment, hostility, or criticism may expect the therapist to behave in the same way.
A therapeutic relationship that repeatedly violates those expectations would create precisely the type of prediction error that forces an internal model to change.
In this view, cognitive awareness is not simply an intellectual realization. It may involve confronting the fact that a deeply embedded prediction about the world has failed.
That failure produces surprise. And surprise, the researchers suggest, may be one of the mechanisms that makes psychological change possible.
A patient who expects rejection yet repeatedly encounters a safe, reliable relationship faces a mismatch between prediction and reality. The person can attempt to preserve the old model, perhaps through interpreting benign behavior as threatening, or gradually update the model to accommodate a different possibility.
This is where researchers believe psychoanalysis may offer something that computational neuroscience alone cannot easily provide.
Predictive processing attempts to explain the mechanisms by which brains generate, test, and update predictions. In contrast, psychoanalysis has spent more than a century attempting to describe what those processes feel like from inside the person experiencing them.
The researchers are careful to acknowledge significant differences between the fields. Predictive processing is primarily a descriptive scientific framework intended to explain how minds and brains function. Psychoanalysis is a clinical practice concerned with psychological suffering and how it might be treated.
There is also a difference in emphasis. Neuroscience often studies ordinary predictions involved in perception and behavior, while psychoanalytic concepts such as projection have frequently been developed through observations of psychological distress and mental illness.
Most importantly, the paper does not present new experimental evidence demonstrating that Freud’s concepts relate to specific neural mechanisms. It is a theoretical synthesis proposing that two intellectual traditions, one built largely on clinical observation and subjective experience, the other on computational and neuroscientific models, may describe overlapping features of the mind.
Nevertheless, the proposed convergence is notable.
Freud originally hoped that psychological theories might eventually be connected to the brain’s biological workings, but the neuroscience of his era was nowhere near capable of doing so. For much of the 20th century, psychoanalysis and experimental neuroscience grew increasingly distant.
Predictive processing may offer an unexpected point of reconnection.
If the brain constantly uses the past to predict the present, then projection, transference, and even the tendency to repeat destructive patterns may be viewed not simply as abstract psychoanalytic concepts but as subjective manifestations of a more fundamental biological imperative: reducing uncertainty and maintaining a workable model of the world.
That position could ultimately change how researchers think about the relationship between the brain’s computational machinery and the intensely personal experience of being human. Rather than treating subjective experience and neuroscience as incompatible domains, the researchers suggest that each may illuminate what the other cannot see.
“Psychoanalysis consists of a vast resource of theories about the subjective mind, projection being central among these, and neuro-psychoanalysis adds an external view of the mind while studying the biological and neurological substrate of psychology,” researchers write.
“Relational encounters in a safe environment, as in psychoanalysis, can produce surprise,” the authors add, “which again permits new ways of predicting and being in the world.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
The brain's memory center may come "prewired," rather than being built from scratch after birth, a new study in mice finds.
The research, published in April in the journal Nature Communications, offers a new perspective on a long-standing question in neuroscience: Does the brain begin as a blank slate and build memories by adding connections through experience, or does it come with built-in wiring? The new research focused on the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain that's essential for forming memories.
Rather than supporting either theory directly, the research points to the latter idea but adds a significant twist.
The researchers focused on a region of the hippocampus called cornu ammonis 3 (CA3), which plays a central role in storing and recalling memories. A trait known as plasticity enables neurons within CA3 to continuously strengthen and weaken their connections and thus strengthen or weaken different memories.
The team examined mouse brain tissue collected shortly after birth, during adolescence or during adulthood. They found that early in life, hippocampal networks are densely wired, with many neurons hyperconnected in a seemingly random pattern. As the brain matures, these haphazard networks become sparser yet more structured as connections are pruned. This pruning begins soon after birth, with significant declines in connectivity by adolescence.
The finding discounts the idea that the hippocampus starts out as a blank slate, or "tabula rasa."
"We find, in a nutshell, that the system is not a tabula rasa, as we thought originally, where you can just write information and then at some point, this information fills the system," said study co-author Peter Jonas, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. "Rather, it starts out as a tabula plena [full slate] and then becomes more sparser and specifically connected."
This pattern may help to explain why we remember so little from infancy.
Memories are thought to be stored within networks of neurons that fire together, representing specific experiences. In a young brain, however, these connections between neurons, called synapses, behave differently, the study suggests. In young brain tissue, a single input could cause a neuron to fire, the team found, while in mature networks, neurons typically require multiple inputs to fire.
Jonas said the team was surprised by not only the early pruning of connections but also how strong those early connections were. "You might think that early in development, you have poor synapses and weak synapses, but we found the opposite," he told Live Science.
This excitability comes at a cost, however: When neurons are activated too easily, different experiences can trigger overlapping patterns of activity. If that overlap is too great, the brain may struggle to distinguish one memory from another. Instead of forming distinct networks, it may generate broader, less-specific memories. In other words, the system is very active but not very precise.
This imprecision may affect behavior, too. For example, rodent studies show that young animals learn to fear an area of a cage where they received a mild shock, freezing when they return to it. But unlike adults, who freeze at that exact location, young animals also have this response in similar environments — so the memory is there, but it's not precise.
As the brain matures, neurons become more selective and require multiple inputs to fire. The result is more distinct, separate networks that translate to specific and stable memories. So in regard to the inability to recall early childhood, it may be that our earliest memories are too poorly defined to be retained in the long term.
The findings are consistent with a growing body of research on how memory develops, said Hauður Freyja Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
"It's exciting on multiple fronts," Ólafsdóttir, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "There is plenty of developmental psychology work that suggests that memory becomes more specific with age. And so it's kind of interesting that now, at the circuit level, we're also seeing that the connectivity patterns are becoming sparser."
So what drives brain wiring before birth? That dense, early connectivity may result from a genetically programmed developmental process. Then, after birth, experience refines the wiring, Jonas suggested.
The findings do not rule out the possibility that experiences before birth leave lasting traces in the brain. But Ólafsdóttir thinks those early forms of learning rely on different neural systems than mature hippocampal circuits.
"I'm not disputing that they're there and that they have influence," she said, referencing prenatal experiences. "They leave a trace, let's say, in our brain and probably in our psychology even." But those traces may not resemble the detailed memories formed later in life.
When asked whether the connections that form before birth represent true memories or are just a byproduct of prenatal development, Jonas said, "The latter is more likely."
The "full slate" may give the brain a crucial head start by enabling neurons to quickly link different types of information, such as sights, sounds and smells. If the brain began as a blank slate, neurons might be too sparsely connected to find each other, making early communication difficult, the study authors think.
By starting with an overconnected network, the hippocampus may ensure that the necessary wiring is already in place, Jonas theorized.
This article was first published May 6, 2026.
See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!
Neuroscientists have long believed that language processing was only found in regions of the brain’s left hemisphere, including the well-known Broca’s area. However, new evidence suggests the brain’s language network is far more widespread than previously thought.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans from 772 participants and identified 17 additional brain regions involved in language comprehension. These newly discovered areas are distributed across the brain, including the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, and several regions of the cerebral cortex. In total, this accounts for five percent of the adult brain volume (roughly the size of a large strawberry).
“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, in a statement.
To find these hidden language-related regions in the brain, the researchers revisited years of brain imaging data collected since 2013. Additionally, participants completed a standard “language localizer” task, during which they read or listened to meaningful sentences and sequences of meaningless nonwords. By comparing brain activity between these two conditions, the research team identified regions that responded more strongly to language.
“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” said Fedorenko. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”
The team decided to adopt a more flexible statistical approach to detect weaker signals and identify previously overlooked language-sensitive regions beyond the classical language areas. They then compared these regions’ responses during a spatial working memory task to distinguish language-specific areas from those involved in what would be considered general cognitive functions.
Interestingly, five of the newly identified language regions are located in the cerebellum, a structure traditionally associated with movement and coordination. Some of these cerebellar regions were also active during non-language tasks, suggesting they may help integrate information across different brain systems rather than process language alone.
“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” says MIT postdoc Agata Wolna, the lead author of the paper.
Additional language-sensitive regions were identified in the hippocampus and amygdala, areas better known for their roles in memory and emotion. Their involvement suggests that understanding language may rely more on integrating memory, emotional context, and higher-order cognitive functions than previously understood in science.
“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” said Wolna. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”
The findings challenge long-held assumptions about the brain’s organization and can open new avenues for research into how language processing is understood in neuroscience.
The recent study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
While a patient is fully anesthetized and unresponsive, neurons in the hippocampus continue to process language, distinguish different types of words, and generate neural activity consistent with predicting upcoming words.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine directly recorded this neural activity, offering new insight into how unconsciousness works at the cellular level. Their findings, published in Nature, show that hippocampal neurons continue to process aspects of language even when the brain is unconscious.
“Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. “Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.”
Sheth’s team recorded from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain essential for memory formation. Researchers collected data during epilepsy surgeries, specifically anterior temporal lobectomies, when patients were under general anesthesia and the hippocampus was temporarily accessible. This rare opportunity allowed researchers to directly record hippocampal activity, something scalp EEG cannot.
The researchers used Neuropixels probes, high-density recording devices that can monitor hundreds of neurons simultaneously. This study represents the first use of this technology in the human hippocampus during anesthesia. Seven patients participated, all under propofol anesthesia with consistent sedation levels maintained throughout the recordings.
In the initial test, researchers played patients a repeating tone with occasional unexpected pitches. Hippocampal neurons consistently detected these outlier tones, and their sensitivity increased over approximately ten minutes. Researchers usually observe this kind of adaptive neural response during wakefulness.
To dig deeper, the researchers built a computer model of a recurrent neural network, trained to perform the same tone discrimination task. The model showed the same pattern as the human brain recordings, suggesting that this increased sensitivity to outlier tones can arise from local brain circuits alone, without the need for higher-level conscious processing.
The researchers also played short stories to anesthetized patients while recording from the same neurons. Hippocampal activity tracked language in real time, distinguishing between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Neural activity reflected both the current word and prediction of the upcoming word in the sequence. “The brain appears to anticipate what comes next in a story, even without conscious awareness,” Sheth said.
“This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state,” added Baylor neurosurgery professor Benjamin Hayden.
The results show that the hippocampus can support neural computations associated with complex cognition even during unconsciousness. This suggests that at least some components of language processing and prediction may not require conscious awareness. Sheth’s team proposes that consciousness does not arise from a single brain region but rather emerges from interactions among multiple brain regions. The hippocampus may process information that later becomes part of awareness.
The researchers noted a parallel with artificial intelligence. Large language models generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence; the anesthetized hippocampus showed a similar pattern of prediction. This similarity may provide neuroscientists and AI researchers with a shared framework for studying language prediction based on biological circuitry.
“Can we use these signals to deploy and run a speech prosthetic for some of the parts of the brain that are damaged by stroke or injury? These are questions that we can now consider in relation to this part of the brain,” said study author and Baylor neurosurgery resident Kalman Katlowitz.
While these results are promising, the team acknowledged the study’s limitations. The research focused only on propofol-based general anesthesia, so the results may not apply to other unconscious states such as natural sleep or coma. Additionally, the researchers examined only the hippocampus, so they cannot yet determine how broadly this type of unconscious processing occurs in other brain regions.
“This work pushes us to rethink what it means to be conscious,” Sheth concluded. “The brain is doing much more behind the scenes than we fully understand.”
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have become a major focus of technological innovation in recent months, with China leading the commercialization of the emerging technology. However, neighboring Australia may soon make its own mark, as the University of Melbourne startup Fluent develops a new device designed to transform how people with speech impairments communicate.
Many communication technologies currently available remain limited for people living with neurological conditions such as motor neuron disease and multiple sclerosis. As these conditions progress, many patients experience increasing difficulty speaking and may eventually lose the ability to communicate verbally altogether.
Fluent is developing a different approach from many existing BCI systems. While invasive BCIs require brain surgery to implant electrodes inside the skull, Fluent’s device is designed to sit beneath the scalp but outside the skull, offering what the company hopes will be a safer and more accessible alternative.
“Until now, this technological capability was only thought possible using highly invasive electrodes implanted inside the skull,” said Fluent co-founder and biomedical engineer Dr. Tim Mahoney in a statement.
Mahoney’s research suggests that signals captured by the device are comparable whether electrodes are placed beneath or outside the skull. If validated through further testing, this could represent a significant advance in BCI development, as invasive systems have historically captured higher-quality brain signals and outperformed non-invasive approaches.
“Our device will be positioned above an area of the brain called the motor cortex, which controls speech muscles. If you think of electrical signals as QR codes: when a person speaks, every individual mouth and jaw movement produces different ‘QR codes’ in their motor cortex,” said Mahoney.
“These ‘QR codes’ also occur when a person with impaired speech is attempting to speak. Our device can capture these codes in a sequence, which tells us what someone is trying to say,” Mahoney adds.
The device captures brain signals and records them in sequence, allowing researchers to understand what a person is attempting to communicate. A machine learning system is being developed to translate brain activity into written text or audio by just thinking about speaking.
“After building the largest English dataset of its kind, we partnered with a Japanese team leveraging an even larger dataset,” Mahoney explained. “This collaboration proved that a model can accurately isolate the correct phrase from a pool of 128 options with 96 percent accuracy.”
To date, the technology has undergone preliminary human testing at the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. During those trials, participants wore a cap fitted with 144 electrodes positioned over the motor cortex while speaking, miming words, and imagining different phrases.
The team’s work resulted in one of the largest English-language brain activity datasets assembled to date. In collaboration with Japanese researchers using an even larger dataset, they demonstrated that an AI model could correctly identify a target phrase from a pool of 128 possibilities with 96% accuracy.
Like other advanced medical technologies, BCIs must undergo rigorous regulatory review before they can be brought to market, and Fluent expects Australia’s approval process to follow internationally recognized standards.
“BCI is a relatively new technology, with the first devices currently being approved in China and the US. The regulatory process for BCI technology follows the same safety and efficacy data requirements used for medical device approval across the various countries’ regulatory bodies. Australia is a fantastic place to perform clinical trials due to its R&D tax incentives, meaning Fluent is well-positioned to streamline our pathway to regulatory clearance,” Mahoney said in an email to The Debrief.
With China and the United States both advancing minimally invasive BCI technologies toward commercialization, Fluent hopes its approach can distinguish itself by prioritizing accessibility over maximum signal fidelity.
“The field of BCI has made enormous progress in the past 5 years. Neuralink is close to commercializing cursor control, research groups have demonstrated online speech decoding with electrodes placed directly on the brain, and META just released their Brain2Qwerty model that can convert non-invasive ‘typing’ brain activity into text,” says Mahoney.
“The subscalp speech BCI that Fluent is building will not have the same performance as more invasive devices,” he adds. “However, we believe our solution is far more accessible, given the low-risk, set-and-forget nature of the device.”
“We also believe that our low-risk approach can deliver near-perfect speech decoding performance when paired with context-aware large language models to correct errors in an informed way,” Mahoney said.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
Before the prefrontal cortex evolved, another system in the brain may already have been directing attention, scientists have now revealed.
In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have identified a small group of brainstem neurons that act as an internal attention filter.
When these neurons were deactivated in mice, the animals became highly distractible, mirroring one of the hallmark features of ADHD. Restoring activity in these neurons allowed the mice to regain normal focus.
Selective spatial attention is the brain’s ability to focus on relevant information while ignoring distractions. This process allows a person to follow a conversation in a noisy environment or recognize a familiar face in a crowd. Conditions such as ADHD and autism also often involve disruptions in selective attention. For many years, scientists believed the prefrontal cortex was primarily responsible for this function.
However, this view does not fully explain how attention works across different species. Primates have a well-developed prefrontal cortex, while other vertebrates have a less pronounced version, yet birds, fish, and turtles still effectively focus their attention.
“If we really go back in evolution, for hundreds of millions of years, birds have had this ability, fish have had this ability. And they do not typically have a highly developed prefrontal cortex, so how does the brain solve this problem?” said lead author Ninad Kothari, a postdoctoral fellow in Johns Hopkins’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “We were able to identify an evolutionarily old region in the brainstem which affords this ability.”
The researchers traced this behavior to a network of inhibitory neurons located deep within the brainstem, a region found in all vertebrates. Mysore’s laboratory had previously studied this area in birds, frogs, and turtles before examining it in mice.
The team created an attention task, similar to those used in human studies, to test the role of these neurons. Mice viewed visual cues on a screen and earned rewards for responding to a target in front of them while ignoring a distracting signal off to the side. This test measured how well the mice could pick out important information and ignore distractions. The mice successfully performed the task until researchers deactivated the brainstem neurons, at which point they became easily distracted.
Before concluding that these neurons controlled attention, the researchers tested for other possible explanations, such as vision or motor problems, that might account for the mice’s behavior. However, the researchers ruled out these alternative explanations.
“The only thing impaired was their ability to take the competing pieces of information, compare them, and pay attention to the location with the most important information,” said senior author Shreesh Mysore, a neuroscientist who studies neural circuits tied to behavior. “This part of the brain is like an attentional selection engine. It helps solve the question: ‘What is most important information I should pay attention to right now?'”
The attention deficit was not permanent. When the neurons were reactivated, the same mice that had previously been unable to ignore faint distractions were once again able to ignore even strong distractors.
“A hallmark of ADHD is that even faint distractors draw attention away — and that’s exactly what we see here when these neurons are silenced,” Mysore said. “But the very next day, when the neurons are turned back on, the same animal can ignore distractors again, even very strong ones.”
“All the evidence to date suggests that these neurons exist in humans too,” Mysore said. “But are they responsible for selective spatial attention in humans? An exciting hypothesis is that they play a crucial role.”
If researchers find that these neurons function differently in people with attention disorders, the circuit could become a target for future therapies.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
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