Stroke Recovery - Brain Accelerator - Spiny Mice - Awareness Under Anesthesia

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/03/orlando-swayne-neurologist-stroke-head-injury-recovery-doctor-interview

The doctor who mends broken brains: why there is room for hope after a stroke or head injury

Ian Sample

Claire was in bad shape. She had been brought to the ward on a stretcher and hoisted on to a bed where she lay curled up in a ball. She was unable to speak, her eyes flat and face expressionless. While she could move her right arm a little, her left arm and both legs were immobile.

Life had changed dramatically for Claire, a mother of three in her late 30s, many months earlier, when she collapsed while on a night out with friends. A weakness in an artery at the base of her brain had ruptured, spilling blood around her frontal lobe. She was taken to hospital, where surgeons removed two side plate-sized pieces of bone from her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. She spent months in intensive care.

Can a patient with such profound impairment improve in any meaningful way, especially so long after the event? That was the question for Orlando Swayne, a consultant neurologist and co-lead of the pioneering neurorehabilitation unit at the National hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a Victorian redbrick building in Queen Square, central London.

It was a few years before the pandemic when Swayne first met Claire on the ward. She made eye contact but showed no other response. He knew from the referring hospital that she could write single-word answers to queries, but these revealed characteristic signs of the brain damage she had sustained. Before leaving her bedside to tend to other patients, Swayne asked if she had any questions. With a pencil clenched in her right hand, she wrote: “Questions, questions, questions,” and then tailed off into a wiggly line. The pathological repetition comes from a failure in the frontal lobe to keep actions moving along in sequence.

“There are some patients who start off, when we first work with them, severely impaired – and I mean very severely impaired,” says Swayne. Claire (not her real name) was one such patient.


© 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited 
--------------------


https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5837620/brain-health-accelerator-gene-therapy-alzheimer

A science powerhouse bets on genetic therapy to beat brain disorders

Jon Hamilton

Scientists who've spent decades learning how the brain works say they're now ready to start fixing it when it breaks.

That's the premise of the Brain Health accelerator, a collaborative effort launched by the Allen Institute in Seattle, which has become a major player in brain research.

The initiative includes plans to develop new genetic therapies — a term that includes gene editing as well as traditional gene therapy — for diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and Huntington's.

"The latest genetic treatments allow scientists to control the activity of particular genes," says Ed Lein, who directs the institute's brain health programs. "That opens up the possibility for very specific precision therapies for brain disorders."

The accelerator is an outgrowth of the BRAIN Initiative, an ambitious research program unveiled by President Obama in 2013. The goal of this public-private partnership was to create tools that would allow scientists to see the brain's inner workings, and, eventually, to develop treatments.

But the effort has progressed far faster than many scientists expected.

"I am shocked at how far we've come in the last 10, 12 years," says John Ngai, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who directs the BRAIN Initiative. "It's just been beyond my wildest imagination — and I've been accused of having a pretty good imagination."

  © 2026 npr


--------------------


https://www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/learning-why-spiny-mice-play-well-with-others/

Learning why spiny mice play well with others

By Hannah Thomasy

Prairie voles have a reputation as one of the most social rodents, but when Aubrey Kelly tried to use them to study the neurobiology of group dynamics, she discovered limits to their sociability.

“Prairie voles are indeed super social with their pair-bond partner and with their offspring,” says Kelly, associate professor of psychology at Emory University. “But if an adult prairie vole encounters a stranger, they’re going to fight—oftentimes to the death.” 

She shifted her focus to paternal care in the voles but stayed on the lookout for a truly social rodent that lived in rich, complex communities. As a graduate student, she had studied the neural circuitry that contributes to such societies in zebra finches, and she hoped to make similar inroads in mammalian brains.

“I got really into the idea of animal societies and how individuals can just get along in big groups, which is something that we do ourselves,” Kelly says.

About four years later, a colleague introduced her to spiny mice. Despite their name, these animals are more closely related to gerbils than to laboratory mice. They live in large, flexible, mixed-sex groups and rarely brawl, the colleague told her. Kelly was intrigued—perhaps these groups were the miniature mammal societies she had been searching for.

Her subsequent work has demonstrated that, indeed, these critters not only tolerate groups but actually prefer them: When given a choice between associating with two peers or eight peers, they spend the majority of their time with the larger group. Now Kelly is digging into the neural mechanisms underlying this communal lifestyle. 

Kelly spoke with The Transmitter about spiny mouse “friendships,” custom CRISPR tools and the neurobiology of coexistence.  

© 2026 Simons Foundation

--------------------


https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-cells-listen-under-anesthesia

A tiny part of your brain may still listen under anesthesia

By Nora Bradford

General anesthesia shuts off conscious awareness, but what do our brains process while we’re under?

Individual neurons in a brain region known for its role in memory consolidation can detect unexpected sounds, decode the nuances of language and even predict upcoming word types in a sentence, all while a patient is fully anesthetized, researchers report May 6 in Nature.

Scientists have been gathering mounting evidence that even when unconscious, our brains can track certain aspects of speech. “The field was already moving toward a more nuanced picture [of what the unconscious brain can do], but this study pushes the boundary considerably further,” says Athena Akrami, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved with the research.

To peer into the unconscious brain, neurosurgeon Kalman Katlowitz of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and colleagues monitored activity in the hippocampi of seven anesthetized patients. The team used a technology developed within the last few years called a Neuropixels probe. These high-density microelectrodes can record the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously, rather than listening to the collective activity of groups of neurons. The team inserted these probes into patients’ hippocampi, in tissue slated for surgical removal as part of epilepsy treatment.

While the patients were under general anesthesia, the researchers played various sounds through headphones. For some patients, this consisted of a series of uniform pure tones interspersed with occasional, unexpected “oddball” tones of a different frequency. For others, the researchers played 10 to 20 minutes of educational videos and storytelling podcasts, like The Moth Radio Hour, to evaluate how the brain processes natural speech. 

© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026. 
--------------------