Read a fascinating new interview in Nautilus with @earlkmiller.bsky.social and @lisafeldmanbarrett.com based on their new paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, "Categorization is 'baked' into the brain." nautil.us/how-does-you...

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

The company's headband uses EEG to measure brain activity while people enjoy their normal sleep routines. The data are processed by machine learning to monitor the effects of treatments, find signs of disease & create patient cohorts for clinical trials. news.mit.edu/2026/beacon-... #neuroscience

#AI for #Alzheimers: MIT-based team releases first AI foundation model for Alzheimer's prevention picower.mit.edu/news/mit-bas...

How neurons sense bacteria in the gut: To understsand the mechanisms that enable the bacterial microbiome to influence brain function, a new study examines the mechanisms at work in a model “bacterial specialist,” C. elegans. picower.mit.edu/news/how-neu... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

A new study of Rett syndrome highlights potential for personalized treatment. MIT researchers tracked how two different mutations alter neural circuit development in organoids and how each could be addressed with distinct potential therapeutics. picower.mit.edu/news/rett-sy... @mitbcs.bsky.social

At the Alana Down Syndrome Center's symposium last week, 7 researchers from MIT, Rutgers and the University of São Paulo shared the work they are doing to help people with trisomy 21 throughout their lifespan. picower.mit.edu/news/alana-d... @mitbcs.bsky.social #downsyndrome

A new paper in @natrevneuro.nature.com challenges decades of dogma about how and why the brain boils down what it sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels into categories. picower.mit.edu/news/complet... #neuroscience #cognition @mitbcs.bsky.social

How do nervous systems produce behaviors? A new MIT study provides a detailed mechanistic mapping of exactly what happens in the brains of C. elegans worms when they “follow their nose” to savor attractive odors or avoid unappealing ones. picower.mit.edu/news/navigat... #neuroscience

What does it mean that Assistant Professor Sara Prescott is "Committed to Caring"? She cultivates a lab where students are challenged to think boldly while feeling genuinely supported, and where they are seen not only as researchers, but as whole people. Read more: picower.mit.edu/news/leading...

Melvyn Goodale at the MIT Consciousness Club Linking Past and Present Worlds in the Visual Control of Behaviour youtu.be/kThwjMtbe6I?... #neuroscience #conciousness

A review of #autism research across our institute as we recognize World #AutismAwarenessDay: picower.mit.edu/news/autism-...

🗓️Join us online April 9 when researchers from MIT, University of São Paulo and Rutgers University will present short talks on their research on Down syndrome and related conditions. Registration is open and free! picower.mit.edu/events/accel... #downsyndrome

Our spring newsletter is out now! In a dish or on a computer, brain simulations can advance basic discovery and biomedical research. Read our cover story (picower.mit.edu/news/brain-s...) and subscribe for free (picower.mit.edu/news/subscribe)! #neuroscience @earlkmiller.bsky.social

New discovery! Several different anesthetics each similarly destabilize neural activity. The insight could lead to a universal anesthesia delivery system to monitor patient consciousness and dosing more effectively. picower.mit.edu/news/three-a.... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

Li-Huei Tsai, who has led The Picower Institute since 2009, will step down as director at the end of the academic year. Her decision frees her to focus on research, including her leadership of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative and the Alana Down Syndrome Center. picower.mit.edu/news/after-1...

The MIT BCS Postdoc Association is looking for a Rising Star 🌟 Showcase your work and meet folks in the department! Deadline 31st May 2026! @picowerinstitute.bsky.social

Last night @wcvb5.bsky.social aired an update on local technologies to help people with Alzheimer's, including by Li-Huei Tsai's lab www.wcvb.com/article/alzh...

This social isolation helps curb the spread of disease across species, researchers found. vist.ly/4qg98

Is The Brain an Analog Computer? Consciousness as Dynamic Brainwave Organization | Earl Miller Mind-Body Solution podcast. youtu.be/vZ1B-MvGMgw?... #neuroscience

MIT neuroscientists have found that mutations that cause Rett syndrome undermine the structural integrity of developing blood vessels. By showing that the problem derives from overexpression of a microRNA,the new study points to a potential treatment. picower.mit.edu/news/rett-sy... #neuroscience

Wow, that was a lot of snow! ❄ Snow much snow. But quick work by MIT Facilities Grounds Services has pushed the wall back from the doors so we'll be back to neurosciencing tomorrow! Photo by Layla Gonzalez.

Three new neural network-based tools enable fast, accurate alignment and annotation of images even in very wiggly subjects🪱🪼. The tools might offer a way to automate cell tracking in other imaging datasets, too. picower.mit.edu/news/worms-a... #neuroscience #AI @mitbcs.bsky.social

🧠 If you are looking to work in #neuroscience #research, check out and bookmark our #careers page right now because we have 10 ‼️ openings listed (and more to come). picower.mit.edu/about/careers

Innovations and Inventions at @picowerinstitute.bsky.social Neuroblox picower.mit.edu/innovations-... #neuroscience

Congratulations Linlin Fan, a new Sloan Foundation research fellow! Fan uses innovative optical tools to investigate how connections change among neurons during memory formation. The fellowship will help her give the technology a big upgrade picower.mit.edu/news/sloan-f... #Neuroscience

🎉We (and 500 fellow local residents) had an awesome time MIT Museum's After Dark last night. @earlkmiller.bsky.social and Matt Wilson's talks anchored the "Memory Lab" theme along with demos (including one by Takato Honda), and Earl and Steve Flavell's band Clever Hans!

Tomorrow night After Dark at the MIT Museum It's gonna be geeky cool fun. Matt Wilson and I will tell you about minds and memory. Clever Hans will play songs of the mind. And perogies and beer! tickets.mitmuseum.org/events/019b3...

Identifying a new biomarker for treatment studies, a collaboration centered at MIT discovered that mice modeling fragile X syndrome exhibit the same pattern of differences in low-frequency brain waves as human patients. picower.mit.edu/news/fragile... @mitbcs.bsky.social

Opening a new window on the brainstem, AI algorithm enables tracking of its vital white matter pathways picower.mit.edu/news/opening... @mitbcs.bsky.social #neuroscience #neurology #radiology

Our director Li-Huei Tsai is part of a new consortium, organized by CureALz, to uncover biological mechanisms driving healthy and diseased brain aging: curealz.org/news-and-eve... #AlzheimersDisease #aging #brain

New discovery! Value-based decisions reorganize neural state space. Options are first encoded in orthogonal subspaces Then the selected option rotates into a "readout subspace". Neural subspace reorganization reflects value-based decision making. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroscience

This Thursday at noon. Join us (over Zoom) for the MIT Consciousness Club. George Mashour (University of Michigan Medical School) - "Consciousness and the Dying Brain" sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

"Tiny, transparent and genetically tractable, these jellyfish are an excellent system to explore diverse biological questions." A new review in Nature Methods introduces Clytia hemisphaerica as a model organism for #biology and #neuroscience. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"They are certainly in the right place at the right time to sculpt cortical circuitry at a crucial developmental stage" picower.mit.edu/news/how-uni... #neuroscience #brain @mitbcs.bsky.social

New in Cell: “CyCLoPs” enables scientists to see when different cell types respond to cytokines in vivo. The @harvardmed.bsky.social & MIT team demonstrates two applications: cells responsive to IFN-γ or IL-17A particularly after bacterial (SFB) exposure. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🙌Congratulations to Picower Institute faculty members Sara Prescott, Laura Lewis and the 16 other MIT faculty honored for their exceptional mentorship! news.mit.edu/2026/mit-fac...

A new ‘biomimetic’ model of brain circuits and function at multiple scales produced naturalistic dynamics and learning, and even identified curious behavior by some neurons that had gone unnoticed in real-brain data. picower.mit.edu/news/biology... @earlkmiller.bsky.social #neuroscience

In Current Biology, the lab of @earlkmiller.bsky.social provides new evidence that the brain recruits and controls ad hoc groups of neurons for cognitive tasks by applying brain waves to patches of the cortex picower.mit.edu/news/flexibl... #neuroscience #cognition #brain

🧠Happy holidays from all of us at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory! Best wishes for 2026 as we look back at 2025. #neuroscience #brain

Do we need to study animals in the wild to fully understand the brain? Maybe. OTOH, I sit in front a computer all day. bigthink.com/neuropsych/n... #neuroscience

As the lab of Li-Huei Tsai has learned how different brain cells mishandle lipid molecules in Alzheimer’s disease, members have used that knowledge to develop possible treatments picower.mit.edu/news/focus-f... #Alzheimer #neuroscience #brain @mitbcs.bsky.social

Congratulations to our newest PhD, Di Kang, who defended her thesis today: "State-dependent properties of brain-wide activity in freely behaving C. elegans" bcs.mit.edu/events/di-ka... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

📰This just in! The FINGERPRINT team has now advanced to the finals at the ADPD Conference in Copenhague, Denmark in March 2026.

Interested in a grad or PhD program in molecular, cellular, or systems neuroscience, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, or neuroengineering? MIT's Research Scholars postbac could be right for you. Applications open today! bcs.mit.edu/postbac1

Thanks! And check out our new review on mixed selectivity, please and thanks. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

A new MIT study illustrates how the brain’s executive control center tailors messages via specific circuits with other brain regions to influence them with information about behavior and internal feelings picower.mit.edu/news/prefron... @mitbcs.bsky.social #neuroscience

MIT researchers have discovered how an immune system molecule triggers neurons in a specific brain circuit to shut down social behavior amid infection. picower.mit.edu/news/too-sic... @mitbcs.bsky.social #Neuroscience #behavior

MIT neurobiologists tracked how >200 motor neurons in fruit flies each edited their RNA, cataloging 100s of target sites and varying editing rates. Scores of edits altered proteins involved in neural communication and function. picower.mit.edu/news/rna-edi...

A new study in mice shows that if the retina of an amblyopic eye is temporarily anesthetized, the brain’s visual response to the eye can be restored even in adulthood. picower.mit.edu/news/mit-stu... #neuroscience #vision #amblyopia @mitbcs.bsky.social