Summary: A longitudinal study of nearly 3,900 older adults revealed that while robust social support helps shield attention from age-related decline across all demographics, it does not counteract the harmful…
Category: brain research
Disruption of Striatal D2 Receptor Neurons Drives ADHD and Impulsivity
Summary: Researchers have demonstrated that deleting the membrane-fusion protein NSF specifically from dopamine D2 receptor (D2R)-expressing neurons leads to striatal shrinkage, severe dopamine depletion, and classic ADHD-like hyperactivity and impulsivity…
Eye Tracking Reveals Where Human Reading and AI Processing Diverge
Summary: A new study evaluated whether large language models (LLMs) can accurately account for human reading dynamics. The team compared eye-tracking data from 368 adult readers against predictions generated by…
Prefrontal Cortex Can Block Creative Problem-Solving
Summary: Researchers discovered an unexpected role for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region traditionally viewed as the executive driver of behavioral flexibility. The team demonstrated that the mPFC can…
Why Psychedelics Make Everything Feel Deeply Connected
Summary: Researchers introduce “apical hypercontextualisation”—a bottom-up neurobiological mechanism explaining how psychedelics (psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline) transform perception and cognition. Moving beyond macro-scale whole-brain neuroimaging, the framework focuses on the cellular…
Receptor Density Shapes Whole-Brain Network Dynamics
Summary: Researchers developed a biologically grounded whole-brain computer model that bridges microscopic molecular chemistry with macroscopic neural activity. The team integrated detailed empirical maps of muscarinic acetylcholine receptor density across…
Early Stress Heightens Adult Anxiety
Summary: Researchers uncovered a fundamental epigenetic mechanism explaining how early-life adversity permanently alters the brain’s stress response networks. The study identified that childhood trauma increases levels of the enzyme SETD7…
How Overconfidence and Loss Aversion Co-Evolved
Summary: Researchers propose an evolutionary resolution to why human overconfidence persists despite causing costly decision-making errors. The study argues that overconfidence functions analogously to a peacock’s tail: a costly evolutionary…
ChatGPT Predicts Human Personality Test Results
Summary: A new study demonstrated a novel method using ChatGPT (GPT-4) to construct, validate, and predict population-level responses for personality assessment questionnaires derived from any source text. The team tested…
