https://phys.org/ en-us Latest news from Allen Institute for Brain Science An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But what we see or perceive is a white square—i.e., the illusion. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-scientists-lasers-brain-cells-uncover.html Neuroscience Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:00:03 EDT news676890361 In a scientific first, researchers from around 29 universities and institutions across North America have teamed up to create a large, versatile, and effective arsenal of new biological tools that will play a critical role in the battle against brain disease. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-05-armamentarium-scientists-generation-tools-brain.html Genetics Wed, 21 May 2025 11:01:17 EDT news667044044 An experiment seven years in the making has uncovered new insights into the nature of consciousness and challenges two prominent, competing scientific theories: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-consciousness.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:00:09 EDT news665135161 From a tiny sample of tissue no larger than a grain of sand, scientists have come within reach of a goal once thought unattainable: building a complete functional wiring diagram of a portion of the brain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-scientists-largest-wiring-diagram-functional.html Neuroscience Wed, 09 Apr 2025 13:24:18 EDT news663423853 In a groundbreaking advancement for families grappling with the challenges of Dravet syndrome, a rare and life-altering form of epilepsy, scientists have developed a new gene replacement therapy in mice that could lead to more effective treatments in humans. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-breakthrough-gene-therapy-alleviates-dravet.html Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Wed, 19 Mar 2025 16:36:04 EDT news661620962 The human immune system is like an army of specialized soldiers (immune cells) each with a unique role to play in fighting disease. In a new study published in Nature, led by scientists at the Allen Institute, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and UC San Diego, researchers reveal how cells known as tissue-resident memory CD8 T cells, play unique and specialized roles based on where they are located within the small intestine. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-immune-cells-gut-disease-roles.html Immunology Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:00:09 EST news656760361 Your blood is a delicate mixture. Researchers and clinicians often use blood to learn what's going on inside our bodies, in part because siphoning off a tube of blood is easier and less painful than taking biopsies of an internal organ. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-scientists-animation-technique-blood-aid.html Immunology Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:22:04 EST news655384921 Scientists at the Allen Institute have identified specific cell types in the brain of mice that undergo major changes as they age, along with a specific hot spot where many of those changes occur. The discoveries, published in the journal Nature, could pave the way for future therapies to slow or manage the aging process in the brain. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-key-players-brain-aging-age.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 01 Jan 2025 11:00:02 EST news654520454 Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, UW Medicine, and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute have created the most detailed picture yet of how Alzheimer's disease (AD) progresses at the cellular level. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-alzheimer-pathology-clock-unprecedented-cellular.html Neuroscience Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:25:38 EDT news648210326 The BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) has launched its first major data release, marking a significant milestone in the ambitious effort to map the whole human brain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-global-effort-human-brain.html Neuroscience Tue, 01 Oct 2024 10:00:49 EDT news646995634 New research by scientists at the Allen Institute's Brain and Consciousness group and Cedars-Sinai offers an unprecedented look at how neurons respond to electric stimulation (ES). Far from being uniform, different types of neurons showed distinct patterns of 'syncing up' with electrical fields. These patterns varied depending on the rate at which the ES was delivered. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-reveals-neuron-specific-responses-electric.html Neuroscience Tue, 04 Jun 2024 14:35:03 EDT news636730501 Scientists have long known that our brains are organized into specialized areas, each responsible for distinct tasks. The visual cortex processes what we see, for instance, while the motor cortex governs movement. But how these regions form—and how their neural building blocks differ—remain a mystery. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-reveals-key-role-vision-plays.html Neuroscience Wed, 24 Apr 2024 11:00:01 EDT news633169021 Imagine you're teaching a dog to play fetch. You throw a ball, and your dog sprints after it, picks it up, and runs back. You then reward your panting pup with a treat. But now comes the real trick for your dog: figuring out which part of that sequence earned the treat. Scientists call this the 'credit assignment problem' in the brain. It's a fundamental question about understanding which actions are responsible for the positive outcomes we experience. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12-brain-reward.html Neuroscience Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:01 EST news621686306 A new study in Nature Neuroscience on 'visual masking' sheds light on how we 'unsee' things and points to how conscious perception is generated in the brain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brains-perceiveor-perceivewhat.html Neuroscience Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:00:02 EST news619090290 In a suite of 21 papers published in the journals Science (12), Science Advances (8), and Science Translational Medicine (1), a large consortium of researchers shares new knowledge about the cells that make up our brains and the brains of other primates. It's a huge leap from previously published work, with studies and data that reveal new insights about our nervous systems' cellular makeup across many regions of the brain and what is distinctive about the human brain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10-human-cellular-entire-brain-reveal.html Medical research Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:00:01 EDT news616321477 An overactive inflammatory response could be at the root of many long COVID cases, according to a new study from the Allen Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-06-covid-patients-persistent-inflammation.html Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Mon, 12 Jun 2023 10:45:03 EDT news605785501 Working with hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images, the team at the Allen Institute for Cell Science, a division of the Allen Institute, put numbers on the internal organization of human cells—a biological concept that has to date proven exceptionally difficult to quantify. https://phys.org/news/2023-01-cellular-database-images-yields-mathematical.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:00:01 EST news592039195 JoAnn Buchanan, Ph.D., was deep into the data. One click at a time, she scanned through the branching, twisting 3D shapes of mouse brain cells on her computer screen. Then Buchanan, a scientist at the Allen Institute, saw something weird: a kind of brain cell she wasn't familiar with. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-11-scientists-capture-snapshots-mouse-brain.html Neuroscience Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:07:03 EST news588874021 If an epilepsy patient needs brain surgery, their brain surgeon often extracts a piece of tissue the size of a sugar cube from the outermost layer to access the regions responsible for the seizures. This excised lump is typically discarded as medical waste since it is far from the diseased site. But to neuroscientists like Jonathan Ting, Ph.D., this brain nugget is "the most precious piece of matter in the universe." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-11-neuroscientists-human-brain-samples-glean.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 14 Nov 2022 16:11:06 EST news587664660 From 300,000 mouse neurons, scientists hope to glean how the brain drives behavior. A newly released publicly available dataset is the largest of its kind and represents billions of split-second electrical pulses that comprise the brain's language of information. From this massive collection of cellular activity, scientists hope to decode the neural computations that underlie behavior. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-largest-dataset-neuropixels.html Neuroscience Tue, 23 Aug 2022 04:15:06 EDT news580446900 If you compare the brain of someone who has died from neurodegenerative disease to that of a healthy person, you can't miss the difference: In the case of severe Alzheimer's, the brain will be noticeably smaller, with large gaps where pieces would normally nestle close together. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-07-cell-scientists-high-resolution-brain-alzheimer.html Neuroscience Thu, 28 Jul 2022 03:22:39 EDT news578197346 Researchers at the Allen Institute for Immunology have been busy. Since the division of the Allen Institute launched in late 2018, the 60-person team of immunologists, molecular and computational biologists, engineers and other staff have been setting up a new way of doing research to handle a massive trove of data that's now wending its way through experiments and analysis: long-term studies of how the immune system changes, responds or fails to respond in the course of a healthy human life or during immune-related diseases. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-open-access-portal-human-immunology-tools.html Immunology Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:15:19 EDT news573308116 Before you read any further, bring your hand to your forehead. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-10-ultra-brain-region-movement-mice.html Neuroscience Wed, 06 Oct 2021 11:00:03 EDT news552722844 Most of us are familiar with the fact that women live longer than men. But fellas, if we told you there was one thing that could be done to increase your lifespan, would you do it? https://phys.org/news/2021-07-castration-male-sheep-aging-dna.html Plants & Animals Tue, 06 Jul 2021 10:05:58 EDT news544784754 A new study from researchers at the Allen Institute collected and analyzed the largest single dataset of neurons' electrical activity to glean principles of how we perceive the visual world around us. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, captures the hundreds of split-second electrical signals that fire when an animal is interpreting what it sees. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-tiny-high-tech-probes-reveal-brain.html Neuroscience Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:24:26 EST news530450661 A new lens on visual neurons is laying the groundwork for a more complete "family tree" of the mammalian brain. A team of researchers from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, published a study—the largest of its kind to date—in the journal Cell today revealing a new categorization of mouse neurons that relies on multiple types of data drawn from each individual cell. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-reveals-holistic-neurons-brain.html Neuroscience Thu, 12 Nov 2020 11:00:03 EST news524382960 After three years of intensive data-gathering and careful drawing, the mapmakers' work was complete. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-high-resolution-d-mouse-brain.html Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 07 May 2020 11:00:07 EDT news508057040 A new survey of the activity of nearly 60,000 neurons in the mouse visual system reveals how far we have to go to understand how the brain computes. Published today in the international journal Nature Neuroscience, the analysis led by researchers at the Allen Institute reveals that more than 90% of neurons in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes our visual world, don't work the way scientists thought—and it's not yet clear how they do work. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-visual-neurons-dont-scientists-thought.html Neuroscience Mon, 16 Dec 2019 11:00:11 EST news495695020 In their quest to map the millions of neural highways and connections in the brain, researchers at the Allen Institute have made a significant step forward, unveiling a new high-resolution view of the wiring diagram of the mouse brain. Their study, which was published today in the journal Nature, traced thousands of connections between brain areas and lays the groundwork for researchers to better understand how brain circuitry might go awry in diseases and disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-10-high-resolution-brain-wired.html Neuroscience Wed, 30 Oct 2019 14:00:08 EDT news491643109 The Allen Institute today released its first—and the world's largest—dataset of electrical brain activity gathered using Neuropixels, a new high-resolution silicon probe that can read out activity from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. These data capture billions of lightning-fast spikes of electrical communication sparked from nearly 100,000 neurons as laboratory mice see and respond to images and short movies. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-10-window-brain-cell-debuts.html Medical research Tue, 15 Oct 2019 11:30:46 EDT news490357838