Knight Initiative News

Faculty, staff, residents and a student were honored for a variety of contributions to Stanford Medicine at the medical school’s 2015 commencement.

Imaging studies have delineated brain networks consisting of discrete brain regions acting in synchrony. This view of the brain’s functional architecture has now been confirmed by a study showing coordination at the genetic level as well.

Carla Shatz's work has aided understanding of disorders such as autism, Alzheimer's

Carla Shatz has uncovered mechanisms that the brain uses to select which connections to strengthen or prune back as brain circuits form.

How often does the accountant turn out to be the life of the party? How often do the Nike sneakers, rather than the Armani suits, call the shots? Yet that may be the case when it comes to – of all things! – creativity.

A new study is the first to directly implicate the cerebellum in the creative process. As for the brain’s higher-level executive-control centers? Not so much.

On a small darkened platform a handful of fruit flies wander aimlessly. There is a brief flash of light and a robotic arm darts downward, precisely targeting a fly’s thorax, a moving target roughly the size of a pinhead.

A key message from Stanford’s annual big data conference was that realizing the potential of precision health means sharing massive amounts of medical and behavioral data.

The Board of Directors of The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is pleased to announce the 2015 McKnight Scholar Award recipients.

Genetic Privacy: The Right (Not) to Know

Two Stanford University faculty members developing techniques for monitoring neurons as they fire signals throughout the brain got a boost in the first round of funding by California’s neuroscience research grants program, Cal-BRAIN.

The ability to detect successful engraftment, integration and function of human cells implanted into the brain of a living animal could potentially speed stem-cell therapies’ path to clinical use.

My recent trip to Washington D.C. to speak before a congressional subcommittee on the problem of opioid misuse was all about unmet expectations.

The bioengineer and psychiatrist will be honored for his seminal role in the field of optogenetics, which allows scientists to precisely manipulate nerve-cell activity in freely moving animals to study their behavior.

Electrical recordings directly from the human brain show remarkable precision in the coordination of widely distributed regions involved in memory recall, at rest and during sleep.

Assistant professors Amin Arbabian, Michael Lepech, Marco Pavone, Manu Prakash and Sindy Tang awarded grants to help promising junior faculty pursue outstanding research while also improving education.

A computer model of brain function helps explain a 20-year-old finding that the way a single noisy neuron fires in the brain can predict an animal's decisions. It turns out neurons without noise can't learn. The type of learning the group modeled reflects

In addition to being scientifically important, Karl Deisseroth's research makes for some really cool-looking pictures.

Interestingly, and on a cheerier note, one of the biggest themes programmed into the Davos agenda this January was a series of events on the new scientific developments about the brain.

BY Bruce Goldman

Psychiatric disorders, traditionally distinguished from one another based on symptoms, may in reality not be as discrete as we think.