The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives
Featured
Arboreal deer mice reveal neural roots of dexterity
Romain Brette reveals fundamental flaws in commonly assumed neuroscience concepts
‘The Brain, In Theory,’ an excerpt
Today’s action potentials
Embrace complexity to improve the translatability of basic neuroscience
Computational neuroscientist Keith Hengen explains his work through illustrations
How to teach programming in the age of AI
‘Friction-maxxing’ in school: Students should read primary literature, not AI summaries
Astrocytes in mouse amygdala encode emotional state
Letter asks Congress for nearly $500 million to sustain BRAIN Initiative
Funding for animal research alternatives reaches ‘inflection point’
Securing the academic pipeline amid uncertain U.S. funding climate
New autism committee positions itself as science-backed alternative to government group
Frameshift: How Caitlin Vander Weele made science communication her business
David Sussillo on persistence, luck and the bonds between life and work
Lack of reviewers threatens robustness of neuroscience literature
A brief history of precision self-scanning
When a researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious.
The state of neuroscience in 2025: An overview
The Transmitter presents a portrait of the field through four lenses: its focus, its output, its people and its funding.
This paper changed my life: Ishmail Abdus-Saboor on balancing the study of pain and pleasure
This paper changed my life: John Tuthill reflects on the subjectivity of selfhood
What a bird’s-eye view of half a million papers reveals about neuroscience
Researchers retract multisensory learning paper after failed replications
The Transmitter’s most-read neuroscience book excerpts of 2025
The Transmitter’s top news articles of 2025
The Transmitter ’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025
We recognize the outstanding achievements of 25 neuroscientists who stand to shape the field for years to come.
The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory
Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky
‘Digital sphinx’ raises questions about connectome models
Head direction cells stably orient mice to outside world
Hippocampus builds reputation as ‘general-purpose statistical learning machine’
Dendrites help neuroscientists see the forest for the trees
‘The Fox, the Shrew, and You: How Brains Evolved,’ an excerpt
‘Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language,’ an excerpt
‘Neuroethics: The Implications of Mapping and Changing the Brain,’ an excerpt
Trading places: What happens when neuroscience turns into machine learning, and machine learning turns into neuroscience?
Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other. I asked eight experts to weigh in on what we stand to learn from this exchange.
The visual system’s lingering mystery: Connecting neural activity and perception
Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools. I asked 10 neuroscientists what experimental and conceptual methods they think we’re missing.