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101 news posts in Neuroscience

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05 Nov 2021

Infographic: How grid cells in the brain help us navigate the world

Image: Corona Borealis Studio/Shutterstock.com Have you ever asked yourself what is it in our brains that actually helps us navigate in the world? Helping us answer that question, Prof May-Britt Moser won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 for the discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. When you think about navigation, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it the well-known GPS system in your cellphone? An underwater journey of a submarine to its destination? Or perhaps a team assignment in the scouts, to find your way back to the camp at night? Would you be surprised to know that our brains have a built-in navigation system responsible for representing our location in the environment and for orienting us so that we can successfully get from one place to another? This mental representation of the environment is often called a cognitive map and was the focus on a Nobel prize-winning paper published by Prof May-Britt Moser. ► Read and download (pdf) of original article While navigation in the environment appears seamless and automatic, the brain’s navigation system is actually quite complex, composed of several brain regions and various cells types. […]

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29 Mar 2021

From ghosts to evil genies: How the world experiences terrifying sleep paralysis very differently

By Colm Gorey, Frontiers science writer/Dr Baland Jalal, Harvard University and University of Cambridge Dr Baland Jalal. Image: Dr Bamo Jalal Dr Baland Jalal has spent years exploring the terrifying phenomenon known as sleep paralysis to find that the sinister entity you see at the end of your bed varies from culture to culture. Writing with Frontiers, Jalal says this has major implications for how it is experienced. Sleep paralysis is something no one will want to experience. After falling into a deep sleep, you suddenly wake up unable to move a muscle or even scream for help. To make things worse, you feel as if there is someone – or something – either sitting on top of you or looking at you from the end of the bed. While the experience will only last a short while, it can potentially have long-term implications as it might trigger a fear of falling asleep. Little is known about what exactly triggers sleep paralysis, but researchers across the world have spent much of their careers trying to better understand – and potentially manage – the phenomenon. One such researcher is Dr Baland Jalal of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and a […]

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26 Mar 2021

What did the brains of the first land vertebrates look like?

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer / Dr Alice M Clement, Flinders University Dr Alice Clement. Image: Flinders University What did the brain of the early tetrapodomorphs, the first fish to develop limbs and walk on land, look like? Preserved brains are very rare in fossils, and even when preserved they were typically shrunken and deformed before becoming fossilized. For this reason, researchers mostly rely on casts of the cranial vault of fossils to study the early evolution of the brain. The closest living relatives of tetrapodomorphs, coelacanths, are known to have brains that are tiny compared to the braincase (1% of volume), so for them endocasts don’t give much information about brain morphology. But are coelacanths representative of extinct tetrapodomorphs in that regard? In a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Clement et al. show that this is likely not the case: among living amphibia – together with lungfish, the next closest living relatives of tetrapodomorphs – 4 basal species of frogs and caecilians have brains with a volume of 49-78% of the braincase. Their brains are somewhat larger relative to the braincase than those of lungfish, newts, and salamanders (38-47%), and the authors suggest that the […]