Behavior

Recent articles

A drosophila connectome.

One year of FlyWire: How the resource is redefining Drosophila research

We asked nine neuroscientists how they are using FlyWire data in their labs, how the connectome has transformed the field and what new tools they would like to see in the future.

By Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
7 October 2025 | 19 min listen
Illustration of a multiple mouse brains and brain slices converging onto one animal.

Reproducibility is a team sport: Lessons from a large-scale collaboration

Building reproducible systems across labs is possible, even in large-scale neuroscience projects. You just need rigor, collaboration and the willingness to look your own practices dead in the eye.

By Anne Churchland
29 September 2025 | 8 min listen
Illustration of a musical staff with notes represented by neurons.

This paper changed my life: Abigail Person on birdsong, feed-forward circuits and convergent computations

By isolating specific neuron types involved in zebra finch birdsong, this 2002 Nature paper from Michael Fee and colleagues revealed elegant neural mechanisms controlling the timing of natural learned behavior.

By Abigail Person
12 August 2025 | 6 min listen
Book cover for Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis, showing several bird species.

‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt

In their new book, published today, Georg Striedter and Andrew Iwaniuk dive deep into the latest research on the neural mechanisms of avian behavior. This excerpt from Chapter 2 explores how birds sleep.

By Andrew Iwaniuk, Georg Striedter
5 August 2025 | 9 min read
Illustration of the outlines of a baby, a bee and a robot filled in with computer code-like characters.

Babies, bees and bots: On the hunt for markers of consciousness

To truly understand consciousness, we need new methods to measure it and detect it in other intelligent systems.

By Tim Bayne
30 July 2025 | 6 min read
Research image of fMRI scans showing decision-making across individuals.

During decision-making, brain shows multiple distinct subtypes of activity

Person-to-person variability in brain activity might represent meaningful differences in cognitive processes, rather than random noise.

By Claudia López Lloreda
18 April 2025 | 7 min listen
Illustration of the outlines of several different animals—including a fish, an insect and a rabbit—each filled in with a different color and overlaid with abstract patterns, lines and shapes.

Premature declarations on animal consciousness hinder progress

Overstating the evidence in support of animal consciousness could impede efforts to develop more accurate ways of assessing it.

By Hakwan Lau
18 November 2024 | 5 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Developing human fetus.

Gene-activity map of developing brain reveals new clues about autism’s sex bias

Boys and girls may be vulnerable to different genetic changes, which could help explain why the condition is more common in boys despite linked variants appearing more often in girls.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
16 October 2025 | 6 min listen
Research image of astrocytic activation in mice.

Engrams in amygdala lean on astrocytes to solidify memories

Disrupting the astrocyte-neuronal dynamic in mice destabilizes their memory of fear conditioning.

By Lauren Schneider
15 October 2025 | 6 min listen
Research image of human cortical organoids.

Parsing phenotypes in people with shared autism-linked variants; and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 13 October.

By Jill Adams
14 October 2025 | 2 min read

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