A curly line connects two pencils that are hovering over overlapping speech bubbles. — **In so many words:** In some of our favorite quotes this year, scientists talked about learning in brainless organisms, post-publication error spotting, nonsense correlations and more.

Illustration by Rebecca Horne and Anya Sahni

Say what? The Transmitter’s top quotes of 2024

“We’ve cured mouse-heimer’s thousands of times…”—find out who said this to a Transmitter reporter, and read our other favorite quotes from the past year.

By The Transmitter

23 December 2024 | 2 min read

https://doi.org/10.53053/ZSAF9661 Cite this article

Sometimes a journalist just knows during an interview—when a source cuts straight to the point—that a particular comment will feature prominently in the published story. Here are some of our favorite quotes from such moments, which occurred in conversations with neuroscientists and in their essays for our site over the past 12 months.

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“We’ve cured mouse-heimer’s thousands of times ...We fail to cure Alzheimer’s disease.”

— Bryce Mander, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at University of California, Irvine, on attempts to rid the brain of Alzheimer’s-disease-linked plaques.

Bryce Mander, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at University of California, Irvine, on attempts to rid the brain of Alzheimer’s-disease-linked plaques.

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“How can a scientist make sure to use valid statistics? The first and most important step is to actually care.”

— Kenneth Harris, professor of quantitative neuroscience at University College London, on nonsense correlations and how to avoid them.

Kenneth Harris, professor of quantitative neuroscience at University College London, on nonsense correlations and how to avoid them.

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“You want to think of science as the one place where mistakes don’t happen, but that’s not realistic.”

— Jan Wessel, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences and neurology at the University of Iowa, on making errors while hunting for them in his research.

Jan Wessel, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences and neurology at the University of Iowa, on making errors while hunting for them in his research.

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“I was giving away degus like crazy. Everybody wanted degus to start their work.”

— Theresa Lee, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on assembling her own colony of degus, an Andean rodent, for studies in neurobiology.

Theresa Lee, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on assembling her own colony of degus, an Andean rodent, for studies in neurobiology.

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“Just because they don’t look like humans and they’re not playing Tetris in an MRI scanner doesn’t mean they’re not doing intelligent and very complicated things.”

— Alison Hanson, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at Columbia University, on signs of learning in brainless organisms.

Alison Hanson, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at Columbia University, on signs of learning in brainless organisms.