Brain

Recent articles

Illustration of waterfall inside a woman's brain.

Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

By Francis T. Fallon, Michael Pitts
28 September 2026 | 7 min read
Nerve fibers from the human graft in mouse brain.

Human brain organoids flourish in emptied mouse cortex

The chimeric mice could help untangle the biology of human brain development or conditions such as autism.

By Brianna Abbott
16 September 2026 | 6 min read

How BCIs reveal the speaking brain

Long-term implants provide an opportunity to study how speech arises in everyday life.

By Claudia López Lloreda, Rebecca Horne
17 July 2026 | 4 min watch
Research image of cursor movement from high gamma activity.

Recording warning: Common brain signal may be misunderstood

High gamma activity in electrophysiologic recordings reflects widespread neural activity, not merely local firing, as previously thought.

By Claudia López Lloreda
30 June 2026 | 5 min read

How the cerebellum is linked to autism

In this video, professors Sam Wang and Peter Tsai explain the role of the ‘little brain’ in cognition, social skills, emotion control and repetitive behaviors.

By Chelsey B. Coombs
22 June 2020 | 4 min watch
Brain organoid cells look different than those in embryonic brain tissue-grid of six images show growth of both types over time.

Cell stress may sap organoids’ usefulness in autism research

Some cells in brain organoids — 3D clusters of cultured brain cells — fail to develop fully.

By Polina Porotskaya
26 February 2020 | 3 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Clockwise: lab mouse, zebrafish, octopus, rat pushing a cube, nematodes, fruit fly.

The term ‘model organism’ should be reserved for biological systems

By referring to artificial neural networks as model organisms, we run the risk of distorting funding priorities and disregard the explanatory power of a shared evolutionary history across biological organisms.

By Marc Coutanche
13 November 2026 | 6 min read

New phase of BRAIN Initiative spawns basal ganglia ‘parts list’

With a standardized cell naming system and infrastructure for data collection and analysis, the basal ganglia project sets the stage for a whole-brain primate atlas.

By Claudia López Lloreda
12 November 2026 | 1 min watch
Research image showing genes containing microexons in mice.

Machine-learning model spots autism-linked variants that scramble splicing

The model provides a way to investigate genetic variation in regions of the genome whose functions have been difficult to interpret.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
12 November 2026 | 4 min read