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
The state of neuroscience in 2025: An overview
Aging as adaptation: Learning the brain’s recipe for resilience
Noninvasive method lifts curtain on cerebrospinal-fluid dance in human brain
Latest
Today’s action potentials
”That means that not only shouldn’t we trust results from studies with 10 or 20 people, we should ignore them. They’re just noise. — KEVIN MITCHELL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF GENETICS AND NEUROSCIENCE, TRINITY COLLEGE IN DUBLIN
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
Going against the gut: Q&A with Kevin Mitchell on the autism-microbiome theory
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 have funding cuts affected early-career scientists’ futures?
How do you anticipate the field changing in the wake of recent funding cuts?
How will neuroscience training need to change in the future?
The Transmitter ’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025
Is neuroscience a coherent field? Or is it becoming more fragmented?
New questions around motor neurons and plasticity
A researcher’s theory hangs muscle degeneration on a broken neural circuit.
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.
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
The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory
Learn about neuroscience labs launched in the past two years, plus a few opening their doors in 2026.
Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky
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.