The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

Featured

Illustration of a musical staff with notes represented by neurons.

This paper changed my life

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

By Abigail Person

12 August 2025 | 6 min listen

A series of colored rectangles in a cosmos-like black space.

Systems neuroscience

The challenge of defining a neural population

By Mark Humphries

11 August 2025 | 9 min listen

Two prairie voles.

Neurobiology

Oxytocin prompts prairie voles to oust outsiders, fortifying their friendships

By Holly Barker

8 August 2025 | 8 min listen

Latest

Contested paper on vaccines, autism in rats retracted by journal

Body state, sensory signals commingle in mouse whisker cortex

Behavioral neuroscience

‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt

Neural dynamics

Neural population-based approaches have opened new windows into neural computations and behavior

Cross-species connectome comparison shows uneven olfactory circuit evolution in flies

Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets

Null and Noteworthy

Null and Noteworthy: Downstream brain areas read visual cortex signals en masse in mice

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

Jennifer Prendki explains why AI needs to emulate life

Emotion processing

Eye puffs prompt separable sensory, affective brain responses in mice, people

Neuroimmunology

Human brain may anticipate looming contagion

Today’s action potentials

WHAT WE ARE READING

“An integrated single-nucleus and spatial transcriptomics atlas reveals the molecular landscape of the human hippocampus”

By Jacqueline R. Thompson et al. in Nature Neuroscience

QUOTE

”
We wouldn’t define a population of people by counting every person you happened to spot while looking down on a city block from a helicopter, but that’s how we do it for neurons. — MARK HUMPHRIES, CHAIR IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

NEW REVIEW

“A neural manifold view of the brain”

By Matthew G. Perich et al. in Nature Neuroscience

Upcoming Webinars

Powered by World Wide Neuro

Perspectives

Artistic illustration of a neural manifold.

Neural dynamics

Neural population-based approaches have opened new windows into neural computations and behavior

By Matthew Perich

4 August 2025 | 8 min listen

Illustration of the outlines of a baby, a bee and a robot filled in with computer code-like characters.

Consciousness

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

By Tim Bayne

30 July 2025 | 6 min read

Silhouette of a student in the stacks of a library.

Policy

What U.S. science stands to lose without international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers

By Joshua R. Sanes

28 July 2025 | 7 min listen

Illustration of people collaborating in different locations.

Education

How to build a truly global computational neuroscience community

By Megan Peters, Bradley Roberts

23 July 2025 | 9 min listen

See all Perspectives

A red pencil sits on top of a stack of white papers.

Spectrum

Contested paper on vaccines, autism in rats retracted by journal

By Marta Hill

7 August 2025 | 5 min listen

Prosocial effects of oxytocin are state dependent; and more

Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets

See all Spectrum

decorative blue background.

Fact sheet: Autism prevalence

Explore our coverage of what the science says about diagnostic changes over time, the role of genes and the environment, and more.

Funding and policy

US dollar bills arranged in a circle.

Funding

Quantifying funding sources across neuroscience labs

By Claudia López Lloreda

18 July 2025 | 1 min read

A group of researchers reading while institutions crumble in the background, and giant mice appear on the horizon.

Craft and careers

Fear and loathing on study section: Reviewing grant proposals while the system is burning

By John Tuthill

14 July 2025 | 9 min listen

Hundred dollar bill digitally cut into small pieces.

Funding

NIH cuts quash $323 million for neuroscience research and training

By Claudia López Lloreda

16 June 2025 | 8 min read

Distorted floppy discs.

Spectrum

NIH autism database announcement raises concerns among researchers

By Angie Voyles Askham

5 June 2025 | 5 min read

See all funding and policy

Craft and careers

AI-generated, blueprint-like illustration of a classroom.

From bench to bot

Many students want to learn to use artificial intelligence responsibly. But their professors are struggling to meet that need.

By Tim Requarth

23 June 2025 | 8 min listen

An opaque cube is repeated multiple times to create the appearance of overlapping cubes.

Spectrum

Sounding the alarm on pseudoreplication: Q&A with Constantinos Eleftheriou and Peter Kind

By Lauren Schenkman

12 June 2025 | 6 min read

A figure in a lab coat walks between rows of giant books.

Craft and careers

On the importance of reading (just not too much)

By Sheena Josselyn

9 June 2025 | 9 min listen

See all Craft and careers

Features

Judit Pungor and Angelique Allen stand in front of a saltwater tank.

Vision

Cephalopods, vision’s next frontier

For decades, scientists have been teased by the strange but inaccessible cephalopod visual system. Now, thanks to a technological breakthrough from a lab in Oregon, data are finally coming straight from the octopus brain.

By Calli McMurray

27 May 2025 | 14 min listen

Illustration of a paper draft covered in notes and sign-off signatures, and surrounded by many hands reaching towards it.

Academia

The last two-author neuroscience paper?

Author lists on papers have ballooned, and it’s getting hard to discern contribution.

By Lydia Denworth

25 February 2025 | 3 min read

See all Features

Human neurotechnology

Composite image of a brain probe, a test tube and a brain scan.

Human neurotechnology

Why the 21^st-century neuroscientist needs to be neuroethically engaged

By Karen Rommelfanger

12 May 2025 | 6 min read

A blue 3D cube made of interlacing smooth, round tubes.

Human neurotechnology

Thinking about thinking: AI offers theoretical insights into human memory

By Terrence Sejnowski

5 May 2025 | 8 min listen

Mock-up of the Neuropixels probe inserted into brain tissue.

Human neurotechnology

Tracking single neurons in the human brain reveals new insight into language and other human-specific functions

By Edward Chang, Jason Chung

28 April 2025 | 7 min read

See all Human neurotechnology

From bench to bot

Computer-generated image of a waveform.

From bench to bot

Keeping it personal: How to preserve your voice when using AI

By Tim Requarth

3 March 2025 | 12 min read

Computer-generated illustration of a black box with many lines coming into its left side and a compressed stream coming out of its right side.

From bench to bot

From bench to bot: How important is prompt engineering?

By Tim Requarth

28 October 2024 | 8 min read

Computer-generated illustration of a pencil.

From bench to bot

From bench to bot: Does AI really make you a more efficient writer?

By Tim Requarth

3 September 2024 | 11 min read

See all From bench to bot

Get notified whenever a new column is published in the AI: From bench to bot series.

PROFILES

Diego Bohorquez portrait on blue background.

Gut-brain

The big idea with Diego Bohórquez

His theories around the neuropod have challenged the boundaries of classic ideas regarding gut-brain communication.

By Sydney Wyatt

20 June 2025 | 14 min listen

Gerry Fischbach.

Neuroscience

Neuroscientist Gerry Fischbach, in his own words

By Ivan Oransky

30 May 2025 | 2 min read

Amina Abubakar, dressed in yellow, stands outside and looks into the camera lens.

Spectrum

Amina Abubakar translates autism research and care for Kenya

By Ruth Kadide Keah

29 May 2025 | 8 min listen

See all Profiles

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Two researchers wander through stacks of pie charts.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Neuroscience’s open-data revolution is just getting started

By Benjamin Dichter

7 July 2025 | 8 min listen

Illustration of a funnel taking abstract shapes in at the top and spouting an organized flow of shapes out at the bottom.

The big picture

To keep or not to keep: Neurophysiology’s data dilemma

By Nima Dehghani

25 November 2024 | 5 min read

Illustration of three figures standing in front of a grid of dots and a world map.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

The S-index Challenge: Develop a metric to quantify data-sharing success

By Loren Frank

8 October 2024 | 6 min listen

Illustration of three figures cleaning data with brooms and brushes.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

A README for open neuroscience

By Samuel Gershman

9 September 2024 | 5 min read

See all Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Books

Book cover for Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis, showing several bird species.

Behavioral neuroscience

‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt

By Andrew Iwaniuk, Georg Striedter

5 August 2025 | 9 min read

Abstract illustration of a human brain.

Community

‘Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders—and How We Can Change That,’ an excerpt

By Nicole Rust

10 June 2025 | 9 min read

Illustration of a treeline in front of a human brain.

Systems neuroscience

‘Natural Neuroscience: Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors,’ an excerpt

By Nachum Ulanovsky

15 April 2025 | 9 min read

The big picture

Data streams into a transparent box.

NeuroAI

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity

To gain insight into complex neural data, we must move toward a data-driven regime, training large models on vast amounts of information. We asked nine experts on computational neuroscience and neural data analysis to weigh in.

By Eva Dyer, Blake Richards

26 March 2025 | 8 min read

Illustration of an image of a landscape repeated over and over again, with some versions distorted and warped.

The big picture

What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?

Teasing out how different subfields conceptualize central terms might help move this long-standing debate forward. I asked eight scientists to weigh in.

By Jason Shepherd

14 October 2024 | 7 min read

See all The big picture