More than a century ago, the anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal unveiled his incredibly detailed drawings of neurons. From these, he posited that neurons were the main building blocks of the brain and ...

“You expect nerve cells to grow to find the one they like,” said Alan Roberts, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and lead author of the study. “These experiments suggest they ...

The brain’s rules seem simple: Fire together, wire together. When groups of neurons activate, they become interconnected. This networking is how we learn, reason, form memories, and adapt to our world ...

Scientists have discovered a new kind of synapse in the tiny hairs on the surface of neurons. The commonly overlooked protrusions called primary cilia contain special junctions that act as a shortcut ...

The hippocampus is a critical region in the brain for learning and memory. For the first time, scientists have observed how stimulation causes the spines on its neuronal dendrites to enlarge. Even in ...

Learning is something everyone does daily—mastering new skills at work, remembering song lyrics, or following directions to new places. But behind these everyday tasks lies a complex biological ...

When we learn a new skill, the brain has to decide—cell by cell—what to change. New research from MIT suggests it can do that ...

What if in our attempt to build artificial intelligence we don’t simulate neurons in code and mimic neural networks in Python, but instead build actual physical neurons connected by physical synapses ...

When a person thinks, speaks, eats, walks, or just sits comfortably with all bodily systems functioning normally, the billions of cells that make up the brain and the rest of the nervous system are ...