Knight Initiative News

Stanford Medicine scientists have developed a brain-computer interface that “reads” thoughts from speech-impaired patients — but only on their command — potentially restoring rapid communication.

Stanford Medicine researchers explain how sleep influences our moods and the ‘bidirectional’ nature of that relationship — plus how we can repair broken slumber to improve our mental health.

The lab’s second crop of pilot awards will foster research in visual attention, the neurophysiology of exercise, and therapies for autism and mild cognitive impairment associated with aging.

New tools that reveal how neuron-specific waves travel through the brains of mice in real time hold promise for understanding diseases such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s, and open avenues for advances in neuroscience and AI.

An interdisciplinary team of Wu Tsai Neuro scientists working on balls of human neurons called organoids wanted to scale up their efforts and take on important new questions. The solution was all around them.

In which addiction expert Keith Humphreys explains how neuroscience is reshaping our understanding of substance abuse—and why policy still hasn’t caught up.

Former Wu Tsai Neuro Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholar Sergey Stavisky helped lead an effort to translate brain signals into speech.

A decade ago, three generations of Stanford scientists banded together to publish a landmark study on one of the brain’s most prevalent structures. Today, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute researchers are discovering that myelin is key to just about every aspect of neurological health.

Research from the Giocomo lab finds that mice create neural maps of the location of rewards, distinct from the well-known hippocampal maps of an animal's location in space.

Wu Tsai Neuro researcher Karl Deisseroth and colleagues drew on a variety of techniques to probe how emotional responses arise in the brain.

Scientists found that humans and mice share persistent brain-activity patterns in response to negative sensory inputs – offering insight into emotion and potential links to neuropsychiatric disorders.

In a favorite 2024 episode, we spoke with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces.

Wu Tsai Neuro faculty scholar Laura Gwilliams is unlocking how the brain turns sound into meaning.
 

In which Wu Tsai Neuro faculty scholar Dan Yamins explores how foundation models of the human brain could revolutionize neuroscience.

Molecular biologist Luis de Lecea is mapping the brain circuits that control sleep so we can manipulate them for a better night’s rest.

In which Wu Tsai Neuro faculty scholar Laura Gwilliams explores how AI chatbots can model the human brain's language abilities.

In a new study, researchers created an AI model of the mouse visual cortex that predicts neuronal responses to visual images.

Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate Lauren O’Connell explores the fundamental questions that underlie human relationships

Psychiatrist Anna Lembke shares what scientists have discovered so far about the potential for GLP-1s in addiction treatment.

Young adults crave closeness, says Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, but often misjudge how much their peers want that, too. His research found strategies that can help nudge people to take a chance on one another.