It’s time for our favorite annual tradition! As 2025 comes to a close, we asked our writers to share one thing that got them excited about neuroscience this year. Here’s what they said.
Catrina Hacker: A whole new world of color
This year neuroscientists at UC Berkeley helped people see a brand new color by shooting a laser into the eye. Under normal circumstances, we can see color thanks to a type of cell in the back of the eye called a cone. To make participants see the brand new color, the team at UC Berkeley developed special equipment to stimulate the cones in an individual’s eye in a way that natural light never could. Participants describe the new color as vibrant and most similar to teal. While we’re unlikely to see this method being used in day-to-day life anytime soon, it’s fun to think about how opening a whole new world of color could change the way we make art or be harnessed to help people who are color blind see the full rainbow of colors.
Read more about it in this Scientific American article.
Victoria Subritzky Katz: Small hits, real brain risks
The movie Concussion helped push sports-related brain injuries into the public eye, bringing the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) to professional footballers into the spotlight, but it told only part of the story. There are lots of questions still in need of answers when it comes to the dangers sports pose to our brains, and growing evidence suggests these dangers may look different across sports and between men and women. Emerging research suggests that the risks extend beyond the intense, repeated head trauma that leads to CTE to much milder activities like repeatedly heading a soccer ball. We’ve learned that even these seemingly mild impacts can impair short-term cognitive performance and are a potential risk factor for developing neurological diseases like dementia. This year, a study looked at these effects in female athletes, who have traditionally not been included or the focus of sports-related brain injury research. They found that female soccer players who performed standard heading drills had decreased cognitive flexibility (a measure of mental performance) in the hours following practice compared to female players who completed the same practice without heading. This decline was larger than what has been reported in male players, suggesting a potential heightened vulnerability in female athletes. While the mechanisms and long-term neurological implications remain unclear, the work underscores the importance of studying both male and female athletes.
Joe Stucynski: Allostasis – the brain as a life support machine
One recent notable shift in neuroscience is towards viewing the brain not just as a thinking machine, but as a governor of all of your bodily systems and their evolving needs – a function called ‘allostasis’. While you may have heard the term ‘homeostasis’ in which systems in your body want to return to a set state (eg. if you need nutrients, you become hungry and you seek out food to eat), allostasis is a bit different. Allostasis refers to the overall coordination your brain implements to balance all of your body’s homeostatic systems and prioritize the most important ones needed to keep you alive and kicking no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re running a marathon or taking a nap after a holiday dinner. Consequently, neuroscientists are increasingly studying the pathways through which your body communicates important sensory information from your organs to the brain – termed interoception – as well as how the brain is organized to support all of your vital bodily functions at once. This fresh new perspective on the overall purpose of the brain can help us ask new questions about how the brain works and discover new ways to treat dysregulation and disease.
Omer Zeliger: Dreaming up new questions
If you’ve ever stepped outside your spaceship, realized you forgot your spacesuit, and thought to yourself, “Hey, wait a second, this must be a dream,” you’ve experienced lucid dreaming! Lucid dreaming, or a dream that you’re aware is a dream while it is happening, has always been difficult to research scientifically because it is rare and very few people can do it on-demand. Recently, scientists across multiple laboratories collaborated to gather data from dozens of lucid dreamers, allowing them to investigate how lucid dreaming affects brain activity in an unprecedented amount of detail. The scientists found similarities between brain activity during lucid dreaming and brain activities during out-of-body experiences, hinting that the two experiences may be related to one another. This is just the beginning of what promises to be an exciting new area of neuroscience research.
Kara McGaughey: Thinking out loud
Many of us have a constant inner monologue in our heads we use to think through problems or mentally rehearse what we’re about to say. What if I told you scientists believe this “inner speech” has the potential to revolutionize communication for patients using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)? Traditionally, speech-BCIs (which are often used by patients with paralysis or severe muscle weakness) read signals from brain areas that control the movements involved in producing spoken words. Because the lips, jaw, and tongue move in different ways when we speak different words, these devices are able to guess what users are trying to say based on each word’s motor “blueprint.” However, this year, a team of scientists at Stanford showed that they could infer words in real time from brain activity not only as patients attempted to say words out loud, but also during periods of inner speech as patients thought quietly to themselves. In addition, to address concerns about user privacy, the researchers designed their algorithm to begin “listening in” when users thought a specific trigger word (like, “Hey, Siri!”). While this technology still has a long way to go, it takes important strides towards making speech-BCIs more accessible while respecting user privacy.
If you’re interested in reading more, this summary of the scientific article is a great place to start!
Stephen Wisser: Psilocybin & pain relief – an emerging arena for psychedelics?
In the past few years, psychedelics (drugs like magic mushrooms and LSD) have received a lot of research attention as potentially new ways to treat conditions like PTSD, addiction, and depression. While most of the research thus far has focused on these three diseases, this fall exciting work was published that adds another condition to the growing list of diseases that psychedelics could help: chronic pain. By performing a surgery on mice that causes chronic pain, researchers discovered that a single dose of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) not only relieved pain, but also anxiety and depression which often accompany chronic pain. The researchers found that psilocybin treated chronic pain by quieting a brain region that is ultra active in chronic pain called the anterior cingulate cortex. While clinical trials testing psilocybin as a way to treat chronic pain in people are already underway, this recent research pushes the field of psychedelics further since it explains how these drugs might be working to treat chronic pain. Psychedelic drugs have a lot of political baggage and are typically given under the supervision of a trained scientist since many of these drugs cause hallucinations. So while we’re far away from a world where you can safely take a magic mushroom pill at home, understanding how psilocybin works is especially necessary to build public trust and prove how these drugs could one day be a safe way to treat chronic pain.
Interested readers can learn more about this work here.
Abby Lieberman: Forest mice and prairie mice have evolved different grasping abilities thanks to differences in the brain
Some mice, like forest mice, spend lots of time climbing in trees, while other types of related mice, like prairie mice, live their lives on the ground. What gives some mice the ability to climb trees but not others? To understand how the brain supports these abilities, researchers compared the forest and prairie mice’s ability to perform the complex grasping motions necessary to climb trees in a recent study. They found that forest mice consistently had better grasping abilities than prairie mice and could cross a narrow rod (much like moving along a thin tree branch) much better than prairie mice. When comparing the brains of forest and prairie mice, the researchers found that forest mice had nearly twice as many brain cells connecting the brain to the spinal cord in order to engage muscles, suggesting that this may be where forest mice get their tree climbing abilities.To test whether brain differences actually cause these behaviors, the researchers bred forest–prairie hybrid mice that mixed the genes of the two species together. The hybrid mice with more brain cells connecting the brain and spinal cord like the forest mice performed best on the climbing task. Together, the behavioral tests and genetic experiments show that living in the trees has driven changes in the brain that support skilled movement!
Emma Noel: Recovery of movement after spinal cord injury
Historically, efforts to promote the growth of connections between neurons after brain and spinal cord injury have been limited by properties of damaged and neighboring cells that make regrowing neural connections difficult. Thus, treatments for brain and spinal cord injury are mostly limited to drug and behavioral therapies that focus on improving symptoms, but not curing the injury itself. Recently, neuroscientists have gotten interested in injecting young cells that can “grow up” to be healthy neurons, called stem cells, into the spinal cord with the hope that they might reform connections and cure spinal cord injury. While most efforts have been unsuccessful, recent work transplanting human neural stem cells into the spinal cord of non-human primates showed promising results. They showed that stem cells can grow and integrate into the damaged spinal cord, and that injecting the stem cells allowed the non-human primates to regain some hand movement after injury. This is an exciting step toward being able to use the same approach in human patients and to hopefully restore motor function to patients with spinal cord injury.
Eve Gautreaux: Our immune system fights germs on sight 🦠👀
When your body comes into contact with an invader like bacteria or viruses, it alerts your immune system which then sends special cells to fight off these invaders. Sometimes, the immune system is too slow, and the invaders win the first battle, making us sick. A recent study found that the brain can give the immune system a head start at even the sight of infection like, for example, seeing a person cough. Using virtual reality headsets, participants viewed sick people from various distances. Blood tests revealed that, after seeing sick people, participants had higher levels of the immune cells that fight infection despite not actually having contact with invaders like bacteria or viruses! According to brain scans of the participants, it appears that brain regions responsible for sensing things in personal space and detecting threats communicate with the immune system via the stress response system. So, if you want some extra armor beyond your flu shot this flu season, maybe enlist a (non-sick) friend to sniffle around you?
Lucas Tittle: A brain mechanism underlying binge eating your favorite snack
I love Doritos (the purple ones especially), and I tend to eat a lot of them in a short amount of time. This year, neuroscientists may have uncovered why I can’t seem to get enough of them. Most of what you taste comes from what you smell. This year, a group of neuroscientists found that the part of the brain that tells you what you’re smelling, called the piriform cortex, also tells you when you’ve had enough of a given flavor while eating. The team found that eating food really quickly (like binge eating my Doritos) turns off the piriform cortex, signaling that you haven’t had enough and to keep reaching for more. The solution might be to eat slower to keep the piriform cortex from shutting down, but who knows if I’ll ever try eating Doritos slowly.
Hayley Lenhard: One bridge you should burn: cancer cells form connections with neurons
You’ve probably heard the phrase “don’t burn your bridges,” but when it comes to a deadly form of cancer known as small cell lung cancer (SCLC), this may not be the best advice. In SCLC, cancer cells originate in the lungs but often spread to other areas of the body such as the brain. Scientists at Stanford Medicine have been studying this phenomenon to better understand how SCLC cells grow and thrive in brain tissue. Their research revealed something very interesting: SCLC cells form connections, called synapses, with neurons, a type of brain cell. Synapses typically act like bridges, allowing neurons to communicate with each other by sending electrical signals, but when neurons form bridges with SCLC cells, the electrical signals they send actually promote SCLC growth. Essentially, SCLC cells that spread to the brain are able to hijack neurons, using them to enhance their growth. But don’t despair! While this may sound scary, this finding opens doors for the development of new therapeutics that slow SCLC tumor growth in the brain by destroying the bridges (or synapses) between cancer cells and neurons.
Check out this article for more info!
Cover photo generated with Chat GPT.
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