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.
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.
Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan features new MIT research examining a child’s ability to decipher when adults are committing “sins of omission.” Researchers found that, “kids can tell when someone isn’t giving them the whole story – and they learn not to trust the information that person gives them,” Khan reports.
Reporting for Wired, Chris Higgins writes about how researchers from MIT have uncovered the mystery of how the human eye detects motion thanks to the efforts of thousands of people from around the world who played the citizen science computer game EyeWire.
NPR’s Joe Palca reports on EyeWire, a computer game developed by MIT researchers to help map nerve connections in the eye. Palca reports that over “120,000 citizen neuroscientists from 140 countries” played the game, helping to produce a map that shows that the eye’s retina detects motion.
“With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction,” writes Mo Costandi in an article for Nature about how MIT researchers have mapped neuron connections in the brain.
In a piece for The Guardian, Mo Costandi reports on how MIT researchers have mapped neural connections in the retina. “A large group of gamers, working with computational neuroscientists, has produced a wiring diagram of the nerve cell connections at the back of the eye, which may have solved the long-standing question of how cells in the retina detect motion,” Costandi writes.
Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes about how MIT researchers have mapped a neural circuit in the eye that helps detect movement. The researchers developed the map through EyeWire, a citizen science game developed at MIT that has users trace the path of neurons in the brain.
Klint Finley, a reporter for Wired, reports on Open Ephys, a project for sharing open-source neuroscience hardware designs founded by MIT and Brown University researchers.