Brain and cognitive sciences

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have identified key cell types that may protect the brain against Alzheimer’s symptoms, reports Sara Reardon for Nature. “Most Alzheimer’s research has focused on excitatory neurons, which relay electrical signals to activate other neurons,” explains Reardon. “But the authors found that the cells with reelin or somatostatin were inhibitory neurons, which halt neuronal communication. These inhibitory cells might therefore have a previously unknown role in the types of cognitive function that are lost during Alzheimer’s.”

Sloan Senior Lecturer Tara Swart Bieber speaks with Newsweek reporter Pandora Dewan about exercises that can help improve memory. "Memory is something that can be trained using neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to be malleable throughout life," said Bieber.

Adjunct Prof. Tali Sharot speaks with NPR Life Kit host Marielle Segarra about how lying impacts the brain. Sharot refers to an experiment she conducted that used brain imaging technology to monitor how the brain reacts to lying and found that as adults “grew more comfortable lying, the emotional response decreased – meaning that the players became more and more desensitized to their dishonesty with each subsequent lie.”

MIT scientists have developed a new brain “atlas” and computer model that sheds insight into the brain-body connections in C. elegans worms, reports Lauren Leffer for Scientific American. “Through establishing those brain-behavior links in a humble roundworm,” writes Leffer, “neuroscientists are one step closer to understanding how all sorts of animal brains, even potentially human ones, encode action.”

Researchers from MIT and Harvard have explored astrocytes, a group of brain cells, from a computational perspective and developed a mathematical model that shows how they can be used to build a biological transformer, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “The brain is far superior to even the best artificial neural networks that we have developed, but we don’t really know exactly how the brain works,” says research staff member Dmitry Krotov. “There is scientific value in thinking about connections between biological hardware and large-scale artificial intelligence networks. This is neuroscience for AI and AI for neuroscience.

A number of MIT alumni including Elaheh Ahmadi, Alexander Amini, and Jose Amich have been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Local Boston list.

Prof. Ev Fedorenko has been studying the differences in “the neural architecture of speakers who speak languages with different properties,” reports Sofia Quaglia for Wired. “Her studies suggest that the core features of language systems in the brain seem similar across the board,” explains Quaglia.

MIT researchers have found that lawyers prefer, and better understand, simplified texts, rather than legalese, reports Jesse Greenspan for Scientific American. “The researchers presented 105 U.S. attorneys with contract excerpts written in both “legalese” and plain English and tested their comprehension and recall for each,” explains Greenspan. “While the attorneys outperformed laypeople overall, they still found the legalese contracts harder to grasp than those written in plain English.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a soft robot that can be controlled by a weak magnetic field and travel through tiny spaces within the human body, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “Because of their soft materials and relatively simple manipulation, researchers believe such mechanisms could be used in biomedical situations, such as inching through human blood vessels to deliver a drug at a precise location,” explains Paul.

MIT researchers have discovered an RNA-guided DNA-cutting enzyme in eukaryotes, reports Science. “The researchers speculate that eukaryotic cells may have gained the newly identified editing genes from transposable elements—so-called jumping genes—they received from bacteria,” writes Science.

MIT researchers have identified a new biological editing system that could “potentially be even more precise than CRISPR gene editing,” reports Laura Baisas for Popular Science. The new system, based on a protein called Fanzor, is “the first programmable RNA-guided system discovered in eukaryotes,” Baisas notes.

Researchers at MIT have showed that “they could induce people to dream about a particular subject and that doing so helped them become more creative,” writes F.D. Flam for Bloomberg. “The findings should remind us that the line between productivity and resting is blurry — especially in creative endeavors,” writes Flam.

Undergraduate student Kathleen Esfahany speaks with GBH host Jeremy Siegel about her work discovering that people are most creative in the early stages of sleep. “The biggest finding and the thing that I think most people would relate to is that there was a nice effect of people being more creative after a nap, versus staying awake,” says Esfahany. “And I think this is well-corroborated by a lot of other studies, but this was just really exciting to be able to see.”

Researchers at MIT have found that lawyers “have an easier time remembering legal documents written in simple English over those filled with so-called legalese,” reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. “On average, for instance, lawyers scored 45% on a test that asked them to recall documents written in legalese, compared to the average 38% scored by nonlawyers,” explains Cara. “But the lawyers’ score also increased to over 50% when they were given the simplified version.”  

MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have found that people are most creative when drifting off to sleep, reports WHDH. “The earliest stage sleep, we call that N1 stage sleep, just a brief nap in that period can really boost your creativity,” says undergraduate student Kathleen Esfahany.