Ryan Collison

Connectomics: Mapping the Brain's Wiring In 1986, scientists published the complete wiring diagram of a brain. It was the brain of a roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans—302 neurons, about 7,000 synaptic connections. It took over a decade of painstaking work, slicing the worm into thousands of thin

Every Neuroscience Headline Lies: Here's What We Actually Know "Scientists discover the brain region for love." "This is your brain on meditation—and it's incredible." "Neuroscience proves free will is an illusion." You've seen these headlines. They show

Predictive Processing: Your Brain Is a Prediction Machine Here's a claim that might ruin your week: you have never, in your entire life, experienced reality directly. Everything you've ever seen, heard, felt, tasted—all of it was your brain's guess about what was out

The Default Mode Network: What Your Brain Does When You're Not Doing Anything In 2001, a neurologist at Washington University named Marcus Raichle was staring at brain scans and getting frustrated. His data had a problem. Certain brain regions kept lighting up when they weren't supposed

Neuroinflammation: When Your Brain's Immune System Attacks Here's a question that would have seemed crazy twenty years ago: What if depression is an inflammatory disease? The classic explanation for depression is a neurotransmitter imbalance—not enough serotonin, not enough norepinephrine, circuits that aren't firing

Neuralink: Elon Musk's Bet on the Brain On January 28, 2024, Elon Musk tweeted: "The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well." That's it. That's how we found out that the most ambitious brain-computer interface project