What is the state of neuroscience?
In this 2025 special report, The Transmitter surveys the research landscape: How is basic neuroscience changing, and where do its practitioners think it is headed?
EXPLORE THE REPORTFeatured
Sex hormone boosts female rats’ sensitivity to unexpected rewards
The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory
Today’s action potentials
”I think he’s one of those rare birds who have been truly essential to two different, independent fields. — MARK GEORGE, ENDOWED CHAIR IN PSYCHIATRY, MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Tracing neuroscience’s family tree to track its growth
Putting 50 years of neuroscience on the map
The buzziest neuroscience papers of 2023, 2024
Perimenopause: An important—and understudied—transition for the brain
Gene replacement therapy normalizes some traits in SYNGAP1 model mice
Neurophysiology data-sharing system faces funding cliff
A change at the top of SfN as neuroscientists gather in San Diego
Establishing a baseline: Trends in NIH neuroscience funding from 2008 to 2024
How will the field’s relationship to industry change over the next decade? Will a larger neurotechnology sector emerge?
How will neuroscience training need to change in the future?
The Transmitter ’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025
How have funding cuts affected early-career scientists’ futures?
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.
New questions around motor neurons and plasticity
A researcher’s theory hangs muscle degeneration on a broken neural circuit.
What are the most-cited neuroscience papers from the past 30 years?
Journal retracts two papers evaluating ADHD interventions
Image integrity issues create new headache for subarachnoid hemorrhage research
First Pan-African neuroscience journal gets ready to launch
Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky
With an eye toward realism, the neuroscientist, who has a new study about bats out today, creates microcosms of the natural world to understand animal behavior.
What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience?
Neuroscience needs engineers—for more reasons than you think
The missing half of the neurodynamical systems theory
The visual system’s lingering mystery: Connecting neural activity and perception
‘Neuroethics: The Implications of Mapping and Changing the Brain,’ an excerpt
‘How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past,’ an excerpt
‘What Is Intelligence?’: An excerpt
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.
Beyond Newtonian causation in neuroscience: Embracing complex causality
The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.