Knight Initiative News

As scientists get better at interpreting the language of the brain, they get closer to not just treating disease, but also enhancing our senses and our intellects. Should they go there?

People have been imagining what would happen if we stuck computers in our brains for a surprisingly long time — since at least 1879 in fact, when Edward Page Mitchell first published “The Ablest Man in the World”.

Leanne Williams, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, envisions a time when a clinician can order a brain scan to help with the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders, much like a orthopedic surgeon now orders X-ra

Brain-machine interfaces now treat neurological disease and change the way people with paralysis interact with the world. Improving those devices depends on getting better at translating the language of the brain.

As scientists get better at interpreting the language of the brain, they get closer to not just treating disease, but also enhancing our senses and our intellects. Should they go there?

Putting patients with dementia into the hospital, unless absolutely necessary, can do more harm than good, according to an editorial recently published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

There is an increasing numbers of addicts switching from prescription opioids to heroin and other synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

The findings of a new Stanford-led study suggest that illicit drugs are beginning to replace prescription opioids as the source of the national drug epidemic.

Oxytocin, a substance involved in nurturing, sexual and pair-bonding behaviors, has also been implicated in overall sociability. A new Stanford study in mice describes the brain circuitry that’s involved.

What is it that makes some people the life of the party, others recluses and still others shoulder-shruggingly indifferent to the delights of social interaction?

What makes us thirsty? A team of Stanford biologists and neuroscientists write in a paper in Science, lies in a set of neurons deep in the brain whose job it is to make life unpleasant for those who’ve gotten behind on their fluid intake.

Shatz herself, after four decades in science, is still a bit amazed by what she and her lab accomplished — namely, a nearly complete reappraisal of how our brains wire and rewire themselves over time.

That voice in the back of your head that warns you off a risky decision? Stanford researchers have identified the rodent equivalent and turned up its volume, using an incredible new tool that allows scientists to observe and manipulate specific cells in t

A virtual-reality hook-up in an experiment designed to freak people out, the better to understand vision-induced fear.

How video goggles and a tiny implant could cure blindness.

Stanford researchers have found that blood from newborn humans can rejuvenate learning and memory in aged mice, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for age-associated declines in mental ability.

Andrew Huberman on using virtual reality to overcome your fears.

Geuris “Jerry” Rivas, a native of New York, was diagnosed with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder when he was 15. Obsessions with organizing and reorganizing the belongings in his bedroom — posters, comic books, videos — took over most of his life.

Of the 37 million Americans who suffer from migraines, a few million progress to a chronic stage of having them more often than not. Stanford investigators hope to find out why.

Carla Shatz, her breakthrough discovery in vision and the developing brain