Yearly Archives: 2025

Source: [Anne Trafton | MIT News, October 1, 2025] Sentences that are highly dissimilar from anything we’ve seen before are more likely to be remembered accurately. “You still had to prove yourself.” “Every cloud has a blue lining!” Which of those sentences are you most likely to remember a few […]

MIT cognitive scientists reveal why some sentences stand out from ...

Source: [Anne Trafton | MIT News, July 3, 2025] MIT researchers found that low-quality visual input early in life may contribute to the development of key pathways in the brain’s visual system. Incoming information from the retina is channeled into two pathways in the brain’s visual system: one that’s responsible for processing […]

Study: Babies’ poor vision may help organize visual brain pathways

Source: [Picower News | July 1, 2025] A first-of-its-kind study in mice reveals that neurons add and shed synapses at a frenzied pace during development to integrate visual signals from the two eyes. Scientists have long known that the brain’s visual system isn’t fully hardwired from the start—it becomes refined […]

Connect or reject: Extensive rewiring builds binocular vision in the ...

Rooted in fundamental curiosity about how the brain works, Picower scientists continue to break new ground in understanding autism and devising treatment strategies Source: [David Orenstein | Picower News, June 16, 2025] None of the faculty members in The Picower Institute is an “autism researcher,” but The Institute has been […]

Autism advances

MIT study finds that an easily measurable brain wave shift may be a universal marker of unconsciousness under anesthesia Source: [Picower News | May 12, 2025] At the level of molecules and cells, ketamine and dexmedetomidine work very differently, but in the operating room they do the same exact thing: […]

Different anesthetics, same result: unconsciousness by shifting brainwave phase

New research on a cytokine called IL-17 adds to growing evidence that immune molecules can influence behavior during illness. Source: [Anne Trafton | MIT News, April 7, 2025] Immune molecules called cytokines play important roles in the body’s defense against infection, helping to control inflammation and coordinating the responses of other immune […]

Molecules that fight infection also act on the brain, inducing ...

Associate Professor Evelina Fedorenko is working to decipher the internal structure and functions of the brain’s language-processing machinery. Source: Anne Trafton | MIT News | April 2, 2025 As a young girl growing up in the former Soviet Union, Evelina Fedorenko PhD ’07 studied several languages, including English, as her mother hoped […]

Looking under the hood at the brain’s language system

Source: [Picower News | David Orenstein, February 18, 2025] New research adds evidence that learning a successful strategy for approaching a task doesn’t prevent further exploration, even if it reduces performance. Maybe it’s a life hack or a liability, or a little of both. A surprising result in a new […]

Even after learning the right idea, humans and animals still ...

Source: McGovern News | Julie Pryor, January 23, 2025] The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced today that McGovern Investigator Evelina Fedorenko will receive a 2025 Troland Research Award for her groundbreaking contributions towards understanding the language network in the human brain. The Troland Research Award is given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career […]

Evelina Fedorenko receives Troland Award from National Academy of Sciences