TL;DR: A 2026 mouse study in Nature Neuroscience found that abdominal muscle contractions during locomotion drove directed brain motion and helped move interstitial fluid through brain tissue during wakefulness. Key Findings Brain motion was tightly coupled to locomotion, not heartbeat or breathing: Two-photon imaging in awake head-fixed mice showed dorsal cortex shifted relative to skull …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found unexpected bilingualism in 38.7% of autistic children aged 2-6, about 4.4 times the rate in typically developing peers, with caregivers reporting screen media as the usual source. Key Findings 38.7% of autistic children showed unexpected bilingualism: Using a language absent from the …
TL;DR: A 2026 preprint electrophysiology study in medRxiv found that the Hurst exponent and gamma oscillations tracked different aspects of excitation-inhibition balance, while human EEG data suggested two autism neurosubtypes with opposing Hurst-gamma profiles. Key Findings Study type: an in-silico, animal-validation, and human EEG study of excitation-inhibition balance in autism. Human EEG dataset: human electroencephalography …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Nature Communications found that self-administered finger-prick blood tests for phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217), an Alzheimer’s tau marker, and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), an astrocyte-injury marker, correlated with cognition and function in older adults. Key Findings Remote sampling: Participants used capillary finger-prick blood collection rather than standard clinic-based venous blood …
TL;DR: A 2026 BJPsych Open study found clinically significant anxiety in about 18% of non-demented ALS patients for state anxiety and 14% for trait anxiety, with anxiety scores driven mainly by cognitive-affective depression symptoms rather than motor severity. Key Findings ALS cohort: The study compared 433 non-demented ALS patients with 313 healthy controls. State anxiety: …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that white matter hyperintensity (WMH) burden, the amount of MRI-visible white-matter injury, was greater and progressed faster in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), with progression tied to worse motor and cognitive scores. Key Findings 369-person MRI sample: Researchers analyzed 204 ALS patients and 165 healthy controls from the Canadian ALS …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint reported that ventral capsule deep brain stimulation (DBS), an implanted brain-stimulation treatment, reduced severe treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms by 22 Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) points on average in 10 participants. Key Findings 10 severe OCD patients: Researchers implanted bilateral ventral internal capsule DBS leads in participants with intractable obsessive-compulsive …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that serum hydrogen sulfide (H2S) levels, a blood measure tied to brain signaling and inflammation biology, were about 7.7-fold lower in drug-naive major depressive disorder patients than in matched controls. Key Findings 100-person comparison: Researchers enrolled 50 drug-naive major depressive disorder patients and 50 age- and sex-matched healthy controls …
TL;DR: A 2026 pilot study in Food & Function found that one month of extra virgin olive oil intake was associated with higher resting-state occipital functional connectivity than regular olive oil in 9 healthy young adults. Key Findings Occipital connectivity was the imaging endpoint: The 9-person neuroimaging substudy came from a larger randomized crossover trial …
TL;DR: A 2026 mouse preprint in bioRxiv found that psilocybin reduced firing in somatostatin (SST) interneurons, inhibitory cortical cells that gate dendritic input, while increasing parvalbumin (PV) interneuron firing in the medial frontal cortex. Key Findings SST firing decreased: Opto-tagged SST interneurons fell from 5.5 to 3.7 Hz after psilocybin, while saline did not produce …
