New York Times reporter Pam Belluck examines new MIT research exploring how the brain links emotions to memories. The study provides a basis for using psychotherapy to help patients “reduce the feelings of a bad memory they have,” says Professor Susumu Tonegawa.
Penny Sarchet writes for New Scientist about how MIT researchers have successfully altered emotions associated with specific memories in mice. "Emotion is intimately associated with the memory of past events and episodes, and yet, the emotional value of the memories is malleable," says Professor Susumu Tonegawa.
MIT scientists have uncovered how memories are linked with positive and negative emotions, reports Dennis Thompson for CBS News. "The memory information stored is not only about what happened, but also about the context in which the event occurred," says Professor Susumu Tonegawa.
Carolyn Johnson writes for The Boston Globe about Professor Susumu Tonegawa’s research into rewiring memories in rodents. “That adds to a body of research from MIT over recent years that has shown that administering a drug can wipe out a negative memory in mice,” writes Johnson.
A team led by Professor Susumu Tonegawa effectively manipulated the emotions associated with certain memories in mice, reports Jonathan Webb of BBC News. “By artificially activating circuits in the brain, scientists have turned negative memories into positive ones,” writes Webb.
Neel V. Patel writes for Popular Science about the online game Eyewire developed by MIT researchers. The game has allowed neuroscientists to gather data that is helping them to map the eye’s neural network.
In a piece for Scientific American about the advantages of dyslexia, Matthew H. Schneps highlights an MIT study that found that people with dyslexia “can distribute their attention far more broadly than do typical readers,” and often have heightened visual and auditory senses.
Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post writes about a new study conducted by researchers from MIT and Johns Hopkins University that showed that sightless people, “understand how others see the world in the same way that sighted people do — though they have never personally experienced a single visual image.”
Nathalia Holt writes for Popular Science about Professor Feng Zhang’s work with gene-editing systems, in particular TALENs and CRISPR, and how these new techniques could be used to help tackle deadly diseases.
In a piece for Wired, Robert McMillan examines new MIT research showing that computers “powered by the latest ‘deep learning’ algorithms,” are catching up in tests that compare their intelligence to those of monkeys.
Rachel Zimmerman of WBUR reports on how neuroscientists have located a neural pathway that could transform how dyslexia is addressed. “In preliminary findings, researchers report that brain measures taken in kindergartners — even before the kids can read — can “significantly” improve predictions of how well, or poorly, the children can master reading later on,” Zimmerman reports.
Lauren Hitchings reports for New Scientist on findings from Professor Earl Miller that show how the the synchronization of brain waves across different regions of the brain may explain our brain’s ability to rapidly process and interpret information.
Carey Goldberg of WBUR features Prof. Ed Boyden’s optogenetics research in a segment on neuroscience advances. “We might be in a golden age of making such tools because most fields of engineering had not been applied to the brain, so there’s just a gold rush of possibility,” says Boyden.
In this compilation of WBUR videos, 11 neuroscientists from MIT, Harvard, and Boston University discuss their current research and the importance of their work. The videos feature five researchers from MIT: Ben Bartelle, Claire O’Connell, Anna Beyeler, Emily Mackevicius, and Neville Sanjana.
MIT scientists have compared the brain activity of adults who had ADHD as children and adults who still have the disorder, reports Melissa Malamut in Boston Magazine. Researchers uncovered, “key differences in a brain communication network that is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on a particular task,” Malamut writes.