Neuroscience News

It's taken more than 20 years to get to the bottom of narcolepsy—and there's still no cure.

We need to collaborate on issues surrounding aging — not just physical health, but also cognitive health and financial security — and that they needed to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities that longer lives presented.

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”.

In its first 10 years, the Stanford Center on Longevity helped expand discussion of the world’s aging population, making that discussion both more inclusive and more optimistic.

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?

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

Part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports exceptionally creative scientists pursuing new research directions to develop pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research.

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.

The Stanford Neurosciences Institute recently awarded its second round of seed grants to six interdisciplinary teams of researchers.

Five Stanford scientists are among the 86 nationwide who have received awards from the National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward program.

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?