Jessica Nelson's team studies the process of habitation: how the brain filters sensory stimuli and decides what we need to ...

Understanding how the brain learns and applies rules is the key to unraveling the neural basis of flexible behavior. A new study from the University of Toyama, Japan, reveals that our ability to ...

Ilya Nemenman, a physics and biology professor in Emory College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected as a fellow in the American Physical Society in recognition of his outstanding contributions to ...

This episode is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron. Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science ...

The wiring and rewiring of the brain never ends. Neural pathways are constantly being reshaped as we interact with the world and learn new things. At MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and ...

Sometimes, even a single experience can be highly impactful, prompting humans and other animals to change their behavior or influencing their future choices. The formation of influential memories from ...

Every day, your brain makes thousands of decisions under uncertainty. Most of the time, you guess right. When you don't, you learn. But when the brain's ability to judge context or assign meaning ...

Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar ...

I wrote about how I investigated the reasons why the fly brain couldn't learn, and how I rebuilt the "world view"—the way sensor values are conveyed to the fly brain—three times. Although I got good ...

Neuronal sequences in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain encode critical information associated with a procedural rule. These sequences can be explored and leveraged as novel biomarkers for ...