Single Experience Learning - Astrocyte Network - Deafness Cure - Neanderthal Speech?

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Apr 25, 2026, 11:02:36 PM (6 days ago) Apr 25

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-type-of-neuroplasticity-rewires-the-brain-after-a-single-experience-20260424/

New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience

By Yasemin Saplakoglu

Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals are released, electricity surges, the connections between brain cells tighten, and our mental models update.

The brain is “incredibly plastic, and it stays that way throughout the lifespan of a human,” said Christine Grienberger (opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at Brandeis University. This plasticity, the quality of being easily reshaped, makes the brain really good at learning — a quintessential process that allows us to remember the plotline of a novel, navigate a new city, pick up a new language, and avoid touching a hot stove. But neuroscientists are still uncovering fundamental rules that describe how neuroplasticity reshapes brain connections.

Recently, neuroscientists described a new form of neuroplasticity that might be helping the brain learn across a timescale of several seconds — long enough to capture the behavioral process of learning from a single experience. In two recent reviews, published in The Journal of Neuroscience (opens a new tab) and Nature Neuroscience (opens a new tab), they describe “behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity,” or BTSP. This type of learning in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub, is caused by an electrical change that affects multiple neurons at once and unfolds across several seconds. Researchers suspect that it may help the brain learn in a single attempt.

“It’s pretty clear that [BTSP is] a strong, powerful mechanism that can lead to immediate memory formation,” said Daniel Dombeck, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who was not involved with the theory’s development. “It’s something that has been missing in the field for a long time.”

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01338-6

Newfound brain network is a ‘secret system’ made of helper cells

Katherine Bourzac

Scientists have discovered that the unsung brain cells called astrocytes form extensive networks in the mouse brain1 — networks similar in some respects to the brain circuits formed by the more celebrated brain cells called neurons.

The researchers compiled a whole-brain, 3D map of astrocyte networks, which the authors say is the first of its kind. It , shows that webs of the cells connect far-flung regions of the brain, allowing the cells to exchange molecules with each other over long distances.

The ‘silent’ brain cells that shape our behaviour, memory and health

“It’s a secret subway system we didn’t know was there,” says Shane Liddelow, a neuroscientist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City and a co-author of a paper published today in Nature describing the work. “This opens up a whole new avenue of investigation.”

Astrocyte networks can bridge the brain’s hemispheres, and they display plasticity, reshaping their connections in response to sensory deprivation, the team found.

The work is “a fundamentally important advance in our understanding of nervous system structure”, says David Lyons, a neurobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who was not involved with the research. He adds that so far, this new evidence of complex astrocyte networks raises more questions than it answers. “Clearly we are some way from understanding what the functional relevance and role of such [networks] is, but there are a myriad of possibilities.”

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/psychedelics/what-trumps-psychedelics-executive-order-means-for-basic-neuroscience/

What Trump’s psychedelics executive order means for basic neuroscience

By Calli McMurray

Last Saturday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order outlining regulatory tweaks intended to “accelerate” U.S. research on and increase access to psychedelic drugs for mental health treatments. The measures target clinical research, not basic studies on how the drugs work.

“This may not be the breakthrough the basic research community has been looking for,” says Shawn Lockery, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon.

The order directs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed up review of psychedelic drugs and allots “at least $50 million” from the Department of Health and Human Services for state governments’ own psychedelics research programs.

One section of the order, however, could eventually make it easier for basic researchers to access psychedelics for their work. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) classifies most psychedelics—including psilocybin, MDMA and LSD—as Schedule I, meaning they have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

Trump’s order calls for the U.S. attorney general to review “any product containing a Schedule I substance that has successfully completed Phase 3 clinical trials for a serious mental health disorder” and consider it for rescheduling to the less restrictive Schedule III.

To study a Schedule I drug, researchers must apply for a license and, if approved, follow strict storage and security requirements. Approval can take up to a year, says Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, who studies psilocybin’s mechanism of action in the brain. “It’s a decent bar to get it. It’s not easy.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/science/deaf-gene-therapy.html

Gene Therapy Enables Children With a Rare Form of Deafness to Hear

By Gina Kolata

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a gene therapy that can cure a rare, inherited form of deafness. The treatment is the first to restore normal hearing in children who were born deaf.

The maker of the therapy, Regeneron, plans to provide it free to any child who needs it. “We wanted to make a statement,” Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s chief scientific officer said on Thursday morning.

He explained that the company wants to be sure its treatment “would be able to reach its full potential and help as many people as possible.”

Some gene therapies for other diseases, priced in the millions of dollars, have had dismal sales.

The therapy called Otarmeni, is intended for children with otoferlin deafness, a rare form of hearing loss caused by a mutation in a single gene. The mutation destroys a protein in the inner ear that is needed to transmit sound to the brain.

Although otoferlin deafness accounts for just 2 percent to 8 percent of congenital hearing loss, the new treatment “is groundbreaking,” Dr. Dylan Chan, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said.

He added, “This is the first time in history that there has been a medical therapy that has enabled deaf children to hear.”

Dr. Chan has been a paid adviser to Regeneron and to Eli Lilly, which is also developing a gene therapy for otoferlin deafness. He is also a principal investigator for Lilly’s clinical trial of the treatment.

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https://nautil.us/could-neanderthals-speak-like-us-1280207

Could Neanderthals Speak Like Us?

By Jake Currie

Chimpanzees and humans share 98 percent of their genomes, so what’s in that 2 percent that makes us uniquely human? According to a new study published in Science Advances, a tiny portion of these genes play an outsized role in our language skills—and Neanderthals had the same sequences.
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These segments of the human genome, known as Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs) are non-coding sequences that showed accelerated evolution after humans split from the ancestor they shared with apes. Even though they represent only 0.1 percent of our genes, they’re responsible for the neural “hardware” for language.

“What we’re seeing is how a very small part of the genome can have an outsized influence, not just on who we were as a species, but on who we are as individuals,” study author Jacob Michaelson of the University of Iowa said in a statement. “These aren’t genes we’re talking about. They’re regulatory regions that act like the volume knob on genes.”

The HAQERs also interact with another vital speech gene: FOXP2. Identified in 1998, FOXP2 is a transcription factor active in the development of the neural circuitry of language use, and mutations in the gene can cause speech problems. “So, if the HAQERs are like volume knobs that can be turned, FOXP2 is one of the hands that is turning these volume knobs,” Michaelson said.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/imagination-perception-overlap-brain-neuroscience

Imagination is not just replaying what we see and hear

By Nora Bradford

If you were to imagine a waterfall, a misty cascade into an azure pool surrounded by towering trees might come to mind. That mental vision might also be accompanied by the imagined roar of water splashing down. But when it comes to our brains, does imagining a waterfall activate different areas compared with seeing or hearing one in real life?

For both sounds and sights, the overlap between imagination and perception appears not in brain areas linked to a single sense, but in high-level areas that accept multiple types of sensory inputs, researchers report March 31 in Neuron.

For years, cognitive neuroscientist Rodrigo Braga has been working to determine whether the human brain is processing mental imagery through hearing and other senses or whether something else is at play.

“When I was a teenager, I remember the first time realizing that there’s like a voice I can hear in my head and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really strange’,” says Braga, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

In this study, he and his colleagues prompted eight participants to imagine scenes, faces, someone else speaking, internal monologues and sounds while in an MRI scanner. The small number of individuals allowed the researchers to collect hours of MRI data to create individualized brain maps rather than averaging across individuals. This technique allowed the team to reliably find individual variation in brain activity during imagination.

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