science

Glial Cells: The Other Half of Your Brain For most of the history of neuroscience, glial cells were the forgotten majority. Your brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. It also contains roughly the same number of glial cells—maybe more. That's half your brain, by cell count, that

Optogenetics: Controlling Neurons with Light In 2005, Karl Deisseroth's lab at Stanford did something that sounded impossible. They took a gene from algae—a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein—and inserted it into mammalian neurons. When they shone blue light on those neurons, they fired. When

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