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

The science of consciousness Through the MIT Consciousness Club, professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller are exploring how neurological activity gives rise to human experience. news.mit.edu/2025/science... #neuroscience

Heard at #SfN25 from @earlkmiller.bsky.social: Cognition and consciousness emerge from the dynamic organization of the cortex produced by traveling brain waves performing analog computations. picower.mit.edu/news/brain-w... #neuroscience #consciousness #cognition @mitbcs.bsky.social

In 2023 the lab of Steve Flavell modeled and mapped how neurons across the brain of a C. elegans worm encode its behaviors. Excited to see that paper now featured here: www.thetransmitter.org/community/th... by @thetransmitter.bsky.social #neuroscience

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “Engineered 3D immuno-glial-neurovascular human miBrain model.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/q1U350XmIwf For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/sweo50XmIw6.

We’re proud to be part of this new @broadinstitute.org effort! In this Q&A Picower researchers Sara Prescott and Ravi Raju describe the project, how they’re involved, and the research they’re doing: picower.mit.edu/news/qa-pico...

To get back on track after a distraction, the brain appears to employ a rotating traveling wave, a new study by the lab of @earlkmiller.bsky.social finds. picower.mit.edu/news/after-d... @mitbcs.bsky.social #neuroscience #cognition

New research shows attention lapses due to sleep deprivation coincide with a flushing of fluid from the brain — a process that normally occurs during sleep. news.mit.edu/2025/your-br...

At our Fall Symposium, "Circuits of Survival and Homeostasis," seven speakers from around the country convened to describe some of the latest research on the neural mechanisms that we need to survive and thrive. picower.mit.edu/news/symposi... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

📃Three late-onset #Alzheimers patients who received 40Hz sensory stimulation for ~2 years performed significantly better on several assessments than comparable AD patients outside MIT's clinical study of the potential therapy. picower.mit.edu/news/small-s... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

Excited that an MIT-based team is one of 10 (out of ~200) to advance to the semi-finals! Learn about our project, FINGERPRINT: An agentic AI that will link discovery, prevention and therapy by reasoning across multiple biological and clinical data sets. picower.mit.edu/news/mit-bas...

New paper: Working memory readout varies with frontal theta rhythms. A theta traveling wave swept across the frontal cortex like radar, modulating performance of a working memory task. Because cognition is rhythmic. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience @picowerinstitute.bsky.social

When spotting what’s changed from one scene to the next, performance will depend on a low-frequency “theta” brain wave that scans the mental image, a new MIT study in @cp-neuron.bsky.social shows. picower.mit.edu/news/radar-b... #neuroscience #cognition

Cultured from induced pluripotent stem cells, ‘miBrains’ integrate all major brain cell types and model brain structures, cellular interactions, activity, and pathological features. picower.mit.edu/news/mit-inv... #neuroscience