Mitochondrial Brains - Restoring Vision - Challenging Attention - Imagining Images

[Breedlove, S]

https://aeon.co/essays/how-understanding-bioenergetics-can-help-our-brain-health

Fuel for thought

Hannah Critchlow

About 2 billion years ago, evolution performed an improbable experiment. A larger ancestral cell engulfed a smaller bacterium. It should have been a meal. Instead, it became a merger. The bacterium survived inside its host, and together they forged one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of life. The host offered shelter and access to oxygen. The bacterium supplied something revolutionary: a vastly more efficient way to generate energy.

From this intimate alliance emerged the eukaryotic cell – and with it, the possibility of complex life. Every plant, animal and thinking being traces its lineage back to that ancient symbiosis. Our capacity for reflection, imagination and doubt rests upon what was once a free-living microbe. We call these descendants mitochondria.

They persist in nearly every cell of our bodies, hundreds to thousands at a time. In total, we carry an estimated 10 million billion of them – collectively accounting for roughly a 10th of our body mass. Red blood cells are the exception: they lack mitochondria, which maximises oxygen transport. Almost every other cell depends on them absolutely. Neurons are especially demanding hosts. Each contains thousands of mitochondria, occupying up to 40 per cent of its volume.

These rod-shaped structures are often described as the cell’s powerhouses. Through aerobic metabolism, they generate most of the chemical energy that keeps cells alive and functioning – the molecular fuel that sustains every biological process.

Although the brain represents just 2 per cent of body weight, it consumes about 20 per cent of our energy at rest. Every perception, memory, emotion and idea is metabolically expensive. Thought itself is an energy-hungry act. Weight for weight, our brains are more mitochondrial than neural. This is more than a biological curiosity. It suggests that cognition is inseparable from metabolism – that the mind is not only shaped by networks of neurons but by networks of energy.

© Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026. 
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/19/the-oscar-of-science-awarded-to-scientists-behind-genetic-treatment-that-restores-lost-vision-win

Oscar of science’ awarded to team behind gene therapy that restores lost vision

Ian Sample Science editor

A married couple who met over a dissected brain and went on to create the first approved gene therapy for blindness have been awarded one of the most lucrative prizes in science.

Molecular biologist Jean Bennett and ophthalmologist Albert Maguire share the $3m (£2.2m) Breakthrough prize for life sciences with physician Katherine High for the 25-year-long project, during which the couple adopted a pair of dogs they had treated for blindness.

The therapy, named Luxturna, was approved in the US in 2017 and has transformed the lives of people born with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a genetic disorder that typically causes total blindness by early adulthood.

Proof that the therapy worked came in a clinical trial in which one patient described seeing their child’s face for the first time, the fine grain in wooden furniture and branches waving in the wind. Other patients reported similar profound improvements.
Nine slices of bread toasted and burned to different degrees, from white to blackened.

“I was overwhelmed,” said Bennett, who is now retired from the University of Pennsylvania. “It was one of the most miraculous eureka moments you can imagine.”

Bennett said it was a “tremendously exciting time” for scientific and medical research, but warned that the US administration’s attacks on science could “cause damage for generations to come”, leading her to fear a brain drain that the country would struggle to recover from.

“Agendas have become politicised, government agencies that support basic and applied research have been undermined, knowledgable advisers and experts have been dismissed or have fled and revised guidelines contradict decades of rigorous research,” she said.

© 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/decision-making/to-understand-decision-making-we-need-to-truly-challenge-lab-animals/

 To understand decision-making, we need to truly challenge lab animals

By Chand Chandrasekaran

Decisions emerge from coordinated activity patterns across many brain areas. The challenge we face as neuroscientists is figuring out how. Technologies such as Neuropixels and optical imaging enable recordings from populations of neurons across many brain areas, leading to enormously impressive datasets with thousands of neurons. But making sense of these data to uncover the computations underlying decision-making has proved elusive. I think it is a great time for the field to design experiments that match the ambition of our tools. By designing decision-making tasks that vary along multiple dimensions and truly challenge our animals, we might finally understand how multiple brain areas coordinate to drive decisions.

The starting point of most decision-making experiments is to get animals to perform a task for rewards, such as juice or food. It is often tempting to train the animal to do “something simple” because the training is easy and quick. Later we can get to the “exciting stuff”: Go in with a kitchen sink of experimental tools to collect neurophysiological data and/or perturb the system and use mathematical tools to uncover how activity in the brain leads to the behavior of interest. 

Though this approach sounds great in principle, analyzing the neural data associated with simple behavioral tasks can be challenging for multiple reasons. First, when the behavior is too simple, the brain does not need to compute much. When many areas could solve a problem, often they do: Relevant signals pop up all over the brain, leaving us with the somewhat puzzling conclusion that the behavior is global. But some tasks may be too trivial to require different computations from different areas, so it’s unsurprising that many areas look similar in such contexts. 

Second, animals perform simple tasks quickly, generating only a narrow window of neural activity from which to try to make sense of how they reached a decision. You might be left with just 50 milliseconds of potentially very noisy neural data from which to understand decision-related computations.

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.npr.org/2026/04/14/nx-s1-5781219/brain-vision-neurons-imagine-new-things

In the brain, objects seen and imagined follow the same neural path

Jon Hamilton

It's often called the mind's eye.

"I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object," says Varun Wadia, a brain scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the California Institute of Technology.

That sort of visual imagination, Wadia says, is what allows most people to conjure the face of a loved one or navigate to work using a mental map.
For 'time cells' in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment
Shots - Health News
For 'time cells' in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment

But its neural underpinnings were a mystery until Wadia and a team reported in the journal Science that imagined and perceived objects appear to activate the same neurons and use the same neural code.

"This has not been demonstrated before at the neural level," says Kalanit Grill-Spector, a psychology professor at Stanford University's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, who was not involved in the research.

With these insights, she says, scientists are one step closer to building computer models that can simulate vision as well as vision disorders like macular degeneration. These models, in turn, could help researchers develop prosthetic devices to restore sight.

The research also helps explain how the brain uses imagination to augment visual information, says Thomas Naselaris, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota.
    © 2026 npr


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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/20/gut-microbiome-can-reveal-risk-of-parkinsons-scientists-say

Gut microbiome can reveal risk of Parkinson’s, scientists say

Ian Sample Science editor

Changes to microbes that live in the gut can identify people at greater risk of Parkinson’s disease long before symptoms develop, according to work that also raises hopes for new therapies.

Researchers discovered signature changes in the gut microbiome that are more pronounced in people with a genetic risk for Parkinson’s and even more stark in those diagnosed with the disease.

The signature could help doctors spot patients at risk of Parkinson’s years before they display clear symptoms and suggests that healthier diets and treatments that reshape the microbiome might prevent or delay the disease.

Prof Anthony Schapira, the head of clinical and movement neurosciences at University College London and lead investigator on the study, said it was the first time a microbial signature in Parkinson’s patients had been seen in people with a genetic susceptibility but had yet to develop symptoms. The signature appears to become stronger as the disease progresses.

“These same changes can be found in a small proportion of the general population that may put them at increased risk,” Schapira said.

Cases of Parkinson’s have doubled in the past 25 years, with more than 8.5 million people globally now living with the condition. The disease causes progressive brain damage, leading to tremors, slow movement and stiff and inflexible muscles. Patients often experience depression, anxiety, sleep and memory problems, and difficulty with balance.

© 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/beyond-inheritance-book-khamsi-mutation

 Beyond Inheritance offers a new view of mutations

By Bethany Brookshire

It’s easy to think of the human body as a single, fully integrated unit. After all, stub your toe all the way at one end of your body, and your brain registers it at the other. A suite of muscles works together to hop up-and-down and the lungs fill with air to expel curses from your mouth. In this moment, your body is one organism, one set of cells all pulling together against the world — and whatever it was that hurt your toe.

But while our cells all work together to help us walk, eat and argue with each other on the internet, they are not all pulling together toward the same goal all the time. Each one of the body’s 30 trillion to 40 trillion human cells is its own world, with its own set of DNA that accumulates its own changes over time.

These mutations can mean nothing, but they can also mean everything. While many mutations are inert, others cause harm. Still others bring hope, and could correct some of the body’s problems, science writer Roxanne Khamsi explains in Beyond Inheritance. The book draws on the latest research across multiple fields of science to show that mutations are with us throughout our lives, shaping our health and our lifespans.

Many people might think of mutations as things that arise and take over only in times of trouble such as cancer. Otherwise, mutation is something that matters only if it’s passed down to the next generation — whether it produces a new eye color or a serious genetic disorder. But mutations do far more than determine what we look like when we’re born and the manner in which we die, Khamsi argues. “Our genetic destinies are not necessarily defined by what we inherit from our biological parents,” she writes.  
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