The following is a statement from the directors of the Carney Institute for Brain Science to members of the institute's community.

Deadly diseases don’t wait. Neither should good ideas. So when two undergraduates thought they’d found a way to stop neurodegeneration, they took action.

When Brown University transitioned to online learning in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, graduate and undergraduate student teaching assistants grappled with transitioning the courses they supported, and their own studies, to a new learning environment.

If fearful emotions don’t encourage people to self-isolate, why did the fear message work?

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.

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.

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.