Neuroscience News

Understanding the brain's mechanics isn't enough to reverse-engineer a functional copy. What's needed is a theory of how those pieces add up to a human being.

If you wanted to reverse-engineer a piece of electronics, the first thing you'd investigate is how the various parts are connected. In the brain, that means tracing the paths of 100 billion neurons.

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

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

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.

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.

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.