Knight Initiative News

Impulsive behavior in teens can go hand in hand with drug use, but the link is weak and doesn’t necessarily predict future behavior. A Stanford psychologist and colleagues think they can do better, using images of the brain.

In a Stanford-led research report, three participants with movement impairment controlled an onscreen cursor simply by imagining their own hand movements.

Millions of people are living with paralysis in the United States alone. Sometimes their paralysis comes gradually, as occurs in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Sometimes it arrives suddenly, as it did for Dennis Degray.

A new organic artificial synapse made by Stanford researchers could support computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies.

Enkephalins are peptides that are produced in response to certain stimuli — such as stress, fear or pain — that also have potent painkilling properties.

Lack of sleep definitely affects your performance the next day, and probably for a longer period of time than you might expect, according to a new study.

A substance called A-beta, is strongly and broadly believed to play a major role in the Alzheimer’s disease’s pathology.

Judging from the very terms used to designate brain research — neuroscience, neurology, neurobiology — you might figure nerve cells (or neurons) are the only cells in the brain worth knowing about or, the only cells resident in that organ.

Astrocytes, the brain’s most abundant cells, are essential to the survival and healthy function of nerve cells. But aberrant astrocytes may be driving brain disorders.

Stanford researchers said they have identified the receptors to which opioid drugs bind to produce tolerance and increased sensitivity to pain, as well as a commercially available drug that limited those side effects in mice.

Stanford neuroscientist Ivan Soltesz, PhD, is a very serious researcher with a focus on the causes of, and treatments for, chronic epileptic seizures in children.

Stanford researchers used a rodent model to discover that shifting the firing pattern of a particular set of brain cells is all it takes to initiate, or to terminate, an absence seizure.

Epilepsy, a pattern of recurrent seizures, affects 1 in 26 people over their lifetime. So-called absence epilepsy (also called petit mal seizures) is most common among children ages 6 to 15 and accounts for about 1 in 20 epilepsy cases.

It turns out that tiny little bits of our brains are constantly cycling in and out of sleep, and when those few cells are down, they miss things. What’s more, when neurons are specifically paying attention, they spend less time in the sleepy part of the c

New research finds that small regions of the brain cycle in and out of sleep, even when awake. The cycles shift toward “awake” when that part of the brain pays attention to a task.

Like a computer’s RAM, working memory serves as a buffer where information, derived from the senses or retrieved from long-term memory, can be temporarily placed so the conscious brain can process it.

The amount of a neurotransmitter called GABA in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex predicted individuals’ ability to keep several things in mind simultaneously, researchers found.

Tom Stoppard’s latest play, which tackles issues of neuroscience and consciousness – leading to its title, “The Hard Problem” – was followed by a panel discussion with scientists from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nothing prevents great researchers from having great personalities.

Stanford neuroscientist Leanne Williams, PhD, has focused her research career on how insights from brain science can help improve care for people with psychiatric conditions.