TL;DR: A 2026 rat study in Psychopharmacology found that THC exposure during late adolescence left adult animals with elevated anxiety-like behavior and impaired object-recognition and spatial-memory performance after a drug-free recovery period. Key Findings Adolescent THC exposure produced lasting anxiety-like behavior in adulthood: Rats given THC (5 mg/kg/day) from postnatal day 42 to 62 (late …
TL;DR: A 2025 study in European Journal of Neuroscience found that slow breathing sharpened fearful-face perception during inhalation but weakened it during exhalation, with magnetoencephalography showing brain-timing changes before the face appeared. Key Findings 31 adults judged faces while breathing on cue: The main experiment paired normal-paced and slow-paced breathing with a fearful-versus-neutral face discrimination …
TL;DR: Across 4,000+ people, the relationship between brain activity and cognitive control flipped direction depending on whether researchers compared people to each other or tracked the same person over time. The finding is called nonergodicity — and it means decades of group-level brain studies may have been telling us the opposite of what’s true inside …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in JAMA Network Open tracked 1,338 older adults from the Rush Memory and Aging Project for up to 19 years using objective wrist-actigraphy and found that each additional hour of daytime napping per day was linked to ~13% higher mortality, each extra nap per day to ~7% higher mortality, and morning …
TL;DR: A 2026 longitudinal study in Appetite following 491 Quebec children found that infants breastfed for at least three to six months showed better inhibitory control — the ability to suppress an automatic response — at age three and a half than infants who were never breastfed, with the largest behavioral benefits in those breastfed …
Blood GFAP Started Mirroring the Brain Only After the BBB Leaked TL;DR: Blood biomarkers mostly failed to mirror the brain while the blood-brain barrier stayed intact; once the barrier leaked, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), an astrocyte injury protein, and inflammatory signals started lining up across blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the fluid surrounding the …
AI Brain Biomarkers Shift When Models Pick Different Features TL;DR: Across more than 12,000 participants and 13 outcomes, overlooked brain-connectivity features predicted cognition and psychiatric traits nearly as well as top-ranked features, but pointed to different underlying circuits. Key Findings Hidden features held predictive power: The authors tested their idea across HBN, ABCD, HCPD, and …
Hearing Aids Beat PSAPs Where Real-World Listening Gets Hard TL;DR: Hearing aids beat personal sound amplifiers where listening gets hardest: high-frequency sound, speech in noise, and daily user satisfaction. Key Findings Hearing aids won the crossover test: Adults with sensorineural hearing loss used either a hearing aid or a PSAP for 3 months, then switched …
Old Autonomy Wounds Made COVID Conspiracies Stickier TL;DR: COVID conspiracy beliefs became stronger when restrictive situations reactivated memories of lost autonomy, suggesting that misinformation can feel persuasive because it repairs an old sense of being controlled. Key Findings 141 Quebec adults linked restriction to later belief: In Study 1, participants read a mask-rule scenario, described …
Mediodorsal Thalamus Activity Restored Belief Updating TL;DR: A Nature Neuroscience mouse study linked a schizophrenia-risk Grin2a mutation to weaker mediodorsal thalamus activity, impaired belief updating, and behavioral rescue when researchers reactivated the thalamus-prefrontal circuit during flexible decision-making in mice. Key Findings Grin2a was the genetic entry point: The mutation affects an NMDA receptor subunit gene …
