TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review posted on medRxiv found that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a weak noninvasive brain-stimulation method, added to cognitive training produced a small short-term cognitive benefit across 27 trials, but the effect faded at follow-up and the evidence certainty was very low. Key Findings 27 controlled studies: The meta-analysis included 1,012 …
TL;DR: A 2026 iScience study recorded human substantia nigra neurons during Parkinson’s surgery and found that putative dopamine-neuron firing was higher after a prior reward, while the next response was modestly faster. Key Findings Direct human recordings: Researchers recorded 27 substantia nigra neurons across 13 sessions in 11 Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep-brain stimulation surgery. …
TL;DR: A 2026 iScience study used simultaneous EEG-fMRI from 24 healthy adults to build reference maps for slow-wave events (SWEs), brief sleep-related brain waves, and proposed SloCAD as a way to measure how an individual brain deviates from healthy slow-wave network patterns. Key Findings Two healthy cohorts were mapped: Researchers analyzed simultaneous EEG-fMRI sleep recordings …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America found that seeing a video tied to the sound source, such as motion from a train, drum, keyboard, bird, or canoe paddle, made faint sounds easier to detect through noise. Closing the eyes raised sound-detection thresholds by 1.32 dB, while videos tied …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Brain found that creativity in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia tracked a rostral prefrontal cortex gradient, meaning the functional separation between default-mode and executive-control networks predicted creative performance. Key Findings 56-person clinical sample: researchers compared 27 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) against 29 control participants from the ECOCAPTURE cohort. …
TL;DR: A 2026 mouse study in The Journal of Physiology found that damaging noise temporarily disrupted sound-offset responses in a brainstem hearing circuit, but those timing responses partly recovered within 24 hours through rapid circuit adaptation. Key Findings Sound-offset responses mark when sound ends: researchers studied neurons in the superior paraolivary nucleus (SPN), a brainstem …
TL;DR: A 2026 Research Square preprint used silent verb-generation functional MRI (fMRI), brain imaging during covert word production, and found early cerebellar-cerebral language-network changes after radiotherapy in 31 children and adolescents treated for medulloblastoma. Key Findings 31 pediatric patients: Children and adolescents with medulloblastoma completed silent verb-generation fMRI before radiotherapy and again within 6 weeks …
TL;DR: A 2026 review in Nature Reviews Neurology argued that neural extracellular matrix (ECM), the protein-and-glycan scaffold around central nervous system cells, is an active regulator of brain plasticity and neurological disease. Key Findings Multiple ECM forms: The review describes perineuronal nets, perisynaptic ECM, periaxonal coats, and diffuse interstitial ECM. Brain function link: Neural ECM …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS One reported that an artificial intelligence model combining enhanced graph attention with bidirectional long short-term memory classified emotion from text, speech, facial cues, and video benchmarks with its strongest performance on the CMU-MOSEI multimodal dataset. Key Findings Three benchmark datasets: The model was tested on SemEval-2018 text, RAVDESS speech-and-face …
TL;DR: A 2026 rat study in Hippocampus found that the dentate gyrus (DG), a hippocampal memory region, gained about 385,000 granule neurons from 2 to 18 months of age even though older development-born neurons were also being lost. Key Findings 385,000-cell net gain: Total DG granule neuron counts increased by about 385,000 cells from 2 …
