The Brain After a Frightening Event: Why Some Memories Fade and Others Won’t Let Go
After something frightening ends, why do some memories fade while others keep returning with full force? Research on the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex is mapping the circuit that determines which memories persist — and why the answer has less to do with forgetting than with which competing neural population is currently in control.
Landmark Study: What More Than 4 Million People Can Teach Us About Fitness, Mental Health and Dementia
A 2026 meta-analysis pooled data from 4 million people across 9 countries to ask whether cardiorespiratory fitness is linked to lower rates of depression, dementia, and psychosis. The findings were more nuanced than the headlines suggested.
Depression Isn’t Simply a Chemical Imbalance: What Neuroscience Says Today
For decades, depression was explained as a shortage of serotonin in the brain. When researchers conducted a systematic review of all the relevant evidence, they reached a different conclusion — and a more complex picture of what depression involves has been taking shape since.
Why Some People Feel Everything: The Neuroscience of Sensory Sensitivity
The brain does not receive sensory information passively. It actively filters and weights every incoming signal — and the architecture of that filtering system varies measurably from person to person. For roughly one in six people, the circuits responsible for sensory gating assign higher priority to signals that most nervous systems quietly suppress.
Your Brain Has a Salience Network—And It Decides What Deserves Your Attention
Thousands of signals compete for your brain’s attention every second. A network you’ve probably never heard of—spanning two key regions—runs the filter. Here’s what it does and why it matters.
Why Children Borrow Their Parents’ Nervous Systems
Before a child can regulate their own nervous system, they borrow regulation from a caregiver. Research in developmental neuroscience is mapping how that process works — through facial expression, voice, and moment-to-moment physiological synchrony — and what happens when the signal is disrupted.
When PTSD and Concussion Overlap: What Can the Brain Tell Us?
For decades, medicine filed post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury in separate folders. Neuroimaging research is showing why that filing system was never quite right — and what the overlap between these two conditions actually looks like at the circuit level.
The Brain’s Pain Dial: Why the Same Stimulus Can Hurt Differently From Person to Person
A paper cut hurts more during an argument than on a quiet Sunday morning. The wound is identical. The pain is not. Research into how the brain modulates pain signals explains why — and the answer is more surprising than most people expect.
What Happens to a Woman’s Brain During Menopause? New Research Is Filling in the Gaps
A September 2026 Nature Medicine study tracked blood proteins across the menopause transition and found changes in inflammatory signaling, synaptic support, metabolic function, and Alzheimer’s-related biology. Here is what the mechanisms look like, and what the science does not yet establish.
The Brain That Won’t Shut Off at Night: Why Exhaustion and Sleeplessness Coexist
Physical exhaustion and an active mind at bedtime feel like they should cancel each other out. They often don’t. The neuroscience of what happens in the brain during those hours offers a clearer picture of why.