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 preprint in medRxiv linked atypical absence seizures in SYNGAP1-related developmental and epileptic encephalopathy (SYNGAP1-DEE) to higher caregiver-reported autistic behavior scores, while caregiver-reported peak seizure frequency did not show the same association. Key Findings 337-person analytic cohort: Researchers analyzed 337 SYNGAP1 registry participants with complete epilepsy and behavior questionnaires. 259 epilepsy-positive participants: Epilepsy …
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 study in Communications Biology found that restraint stress weakened medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC, a frontal brain region that helps organize social behavior) activity during social testing, while stress-activated amygdala and hypothalamic oxytocin inputs pushed the circuit toward inhibition. Key Findings Two-hour acute restraint preserved basic sociability but disrupted social novelty preference, suggesting …
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 2025 study in PNAS found that sLC35F2 emerged as the high-specificity transporter for queuine and queuosine, linking gut-derived micronutrients to tRNA modification and the cell’s protein-translation machinery. Key Findings 30-year transporter mystery: Scientists had suspected a selective queuine transporter for more than three decades. SLC35F2 carried Q and q: The study identifies SLC35F2 …
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 preprint in medRxiv reported that REDDI, an interpretable AI pipeline using resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG), classified four neurodegenerative diseases with mean balanced accuracy of 0.81. Key Findings The dataset covered four disease groups: it included 32 people with mild cognitive impairment, 18 with multiple sclerosis, 20 with Parkinson’s disease, and 39 with amyotrophic …
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 trial in Journal of Psychopharmacology found that repeated supervised psilocybin sessions reduced Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) scores, a standard measure of obsession and compulsion severity, in 15 adults with OCD. Key Findings 73.3% met responder criteria: At the end of the 8-week treatment, 11 of 15 participants had at least a …
