By 2040, approximately one in five people in the U.S. will be 65 years old or older. As Americans are increasingly dealing with age-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s, Brown researchers are trying to understand why aging occurs in an attempt to meet the country’s growing health care needs.

Scientists at the Carney Institute for Brain Science have identified one way that a synaptic calcium channel protein in sensory neurons is modulated, providing insight into mechanisms that contribute to chronic pain. The research has the potential to inform new therapeutic targets for abnormal pain conditions.

A Brown University alumnus, who is now a medical student, has been named a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. Mark Aurel Nagy will receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years through the program, which honors immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing graduate degrees.

Thomas and I discuss the role of recurrence in visual cognition: how brains somehow excel with so few “layers” compared to deep nets, how feedback recurrence can underlie visual reasoning, how LSTM gate-like processing could explain the function of canonical cortical microcircuits, the current limitations of deep learning networks like adversarial examples, and a bit of history in modeling our hierarchical visual system, including his work with the HMAX model and interacting with the deep learning folks as convolutional neural networks were being developed.

As SARS-CoV-2 spreads across the globe, physicians and public health officials are desperate for new tools to identify infections early. An exciting possibility comes from anecdotal evidence that links COVID-19 to the loss of smell.

A new study has uncovered a mechanism that is one piece of the puzzle that allows the brain and central nervous system to self-assemble during development. These findings could help scientists develop potential therapies for central nervous system injuries.

A new study by researchers from Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that a neural circuit underlies the hypersensitivity that is characteristic to autism spectrum disorder, identifying potential targets for therapies.

When the COVID-19 crisis sent Brown University’s staff, faculty and students home to facilitate social distancing, Deborah Murphy fired up her sewing machine and stitched more than 100 protective masks for family, friends and members of the Carney Institute for Brain Science community.

Scientists often struggle with the big “why” questions, and that has been the case for sleep researchers. Answers to the why sleep question, however, have been revealing themselves more and more as basic, behavioral and clinical science probing sleep function become more available and intense.

It’s 11 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 21, when Monica Linden, a senior lecturer of neuroscience at Brown University, rings a bell and asks her students to close their eyes, take a deep breath and focus on their posture.

Stephanie Jones, a computational neuroscientist at Brown University, is on a mission to decipher the geography of brain signaling. She teamed up with other scientists to develop an open-source software to better understand circuit mechanisms in the brain.

Six interdisciplinary teams of scientists affiliated with the Carney Institute for Brain Science have received Research Seed Funds from Brown University.

“Tootan” (breaking) is the Hindi-Urdu word for drug withdrawals. In ethnographic work with heroin addicts in north India, I repeatedly encountered this word in moving accounts by treatment-seekers, caregivers and family members as they described the screams and agony, the “tootan,” the increasing intensity of which might be a tipping point for treatment seeking or the prelude to an opioid-related overdose death.

A new collaboration of scientists works to push solutions to brain diseases out of the lab and into the hands of patients.

Across the city, firm-to-firm meetings take place informally, and one wonders what deals are being hammered out in hotel lobbies, in coffee shops, on Union Square, and on every floor of Macy’s—anywhere there’s a corner to sit and talk in semi-privacy. In the evening, socials pop up across the city, hosted by law firms and investment houses, where the deal-making and networking continues, fueled by cocktails.

Amitai Shenhav is one of eight psychological scientists nationwide to receive the 2020 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, and 5.8 million Americans are living with this disease. Salloway, who is affiliated with Brown's Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, leads the Rhode Island studies of the first drug to prevent Alzheimer’s.