NeuroscienceAugust 30, 2026Yang Wang, Sinem Cetinkaya Karaca, Mille Deckmann Rasmussen et al.
Classical psychedelics exert therapeutic effects on affective disorders, with serotonin 5-HT2A receptor activation thought to play a central role. The cellular mechanisms by which 5-HT2A signaling modulates neural circuits remain incompletely understood and may differ across mood-regulating brain regions. While psychedelic actions have been extensively studied in the medial prefrontal cortex,...
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide, and current antidepressants are limited by delayed onset and incomplete efficacy. Esketamine produces antidepressant effects more rapidly than conventional treatments, but its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We examined whether cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1R) signaling is associated with hippocampal...
Meditation practice has been associated with changes in EEG oscillatory activity, although findings across studies remain heterogeneous. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined frequency-specific EEG patterns associated with meditation practice. Frequency-specific random-effects meta-analyses and multilevel nested mixed-effects meta-regression models were used to account for the...
Perception is increasingly framed, across neuroscience and theoretical psychology, as an active inferential process rather than a passive transcription of the external world. Contemporary models suggest that sensory experience emerges from internally generated hypotheses constrained by prediction, uncertainty, and the statistical structure of the environment. Long before these developments,...
NeuroscienceMay 25, 2026Caitlyn C Costa, Aoife S Weiss, Caroline M Limbaker et al.
Rates of cannabis use continue to rise, however, the neurocognitive effects are not fully characterized. Deficitsin memory processes, especially in adolescents, have been reportedfollowing exposure toΔ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive componentin cannabis. Treatments addressing these deficits have been unsuccessful. Here, we test the hypothesis that vaporized THC/cannabis...
Mitochondrial dysfunction is increasingly recognized as a central driver of Alzheimer's disease (AD), contributing to neuroinflammation, synaptic failure, and energy collapse.Emerging preclinical evidence suggests that classic hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), mescaline, may restore mitochondrial integrity by activating Serotonin...
Meditation is a widely recognized practice that enhances mental well-being and cognitive function. Despite advances in EEG meditation neuroscience, challenges persist in extracting robust and interpretable features from complex, non-stationary EEG signals. Existing classification methods often rely on limited feature sets and traditional machine learning approaches. These methods lack...
The biological mind is created by brain activity, and the mind's experiences and thoughts can change its structure and function. To construct a digital twin brain, it is possible to decode the unique activity of the human brain for each of the mental faculties responsible for all mental phenomena, create their digital twins, and connect them to the reconstructed and simulated neural circuits of...
NeuroscienceMarch 23, 2026Eliza Jacobs-Brichford, Rachel M. Donka, Amy W. Lasek et al.
Maturation of inhibitory signaling during critical period development depends on neural activity driven by experience. Parvalbumin positive (PV+) interneurons, the dominant type of inhibitory interneuron in prefrontal cortex (PFC), undergo critical period development during adolescence. Their maturation is supported by perineuronal nets (PNNs), lattice-like extracellular matrix structures that...
NeuroscienceJanuary 26, 2026Batoul Darwish, Jad El Masri, Lina Hourieh et al.
Neurogenesis in the adult brain is a precisely regulated process that remains highly sensitive to intrinsic and extrinsic influences. Among the external factors are psychological conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which arises after exposure to trauma such as war, accidents, violence, or natural disasters. PTSD, as well as other disorders like stress and depression, has...
Pharmacotherapy for MDD is commonly prescribed to patients, yet fewer than half achieve remission. Moreover, many patients exhibit intolerant responses to pharmacological treatment, highlighting the need to explore new forms of therapy. The present work provides a narrative review of classic psychedelics as an alternative to MDD treatment. In addition, mechanisms by which psychedelics exert...
NeuroscienceOctober 5, 2025Jannik Nicklas Eliasen, Amir Rezagholizadeh, Helene Påbøl Jacobsen et al.1 citation
Depression and substance use disorder affect millions world-wide, and risk factors include sex. Conventional pharmacotherapies show at best a 50 % success rate. Psychedelics exhibit both anti-addictive and anti-depressive properties. One of these, ibogaine, a root bark sourced alkaloid, interacts with receptors implicated in anti-depressive and anti-addictive effects with affinities in the...
We aimed to investigate the relationship between changes in resting-state functional connectivity in a subregion of the hippocampus and the antidepressant effects of esketamine as well as to identify potential neuroimaging markers of the treatment outcomes. Twenty-nine patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) received six intravenous infusions of esketamine. All patients completed the...
NeuroscienceMay 7, 2025Murilo Barboza Fontoura, Jessica Leandra Oliveira da Rosa, Domenika Rubert Rossato et al.3 citations
Addiction is a chronic condition that poses a serious public health challenge, particularly highlighted by the global opioid crisis involving drugs such as morphine (MORPH). One of the major obstacles in effective detoxification is the high relapse rate, with many individuals resuming drug use after withdrawal. Pharmacological treatments developed so far have generally shown limited efficacy in...
NeuroscienceApril 6, 2025Chandan Srivastava, Jamie A O'Reilly, Rashmi Gupta2 citations
Over the past fifty years, research has enhanced our understanding of meditation and its effects on cognition. Meditation is particularly promising due to its long-term (trait) effects, which persist outside meditation sessions. Advances in neuroimaging have enabled the study of these effects using neural markers such as mismatch negativity (MMN), which reflects the involuntary shift of...
Opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH) is a serious complication during the pain treatment. Ketamine has been commonly reported to treat OIH, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Gut microbiota is recently recognized as one of the important mechanisms underlying the occurrence and treatment of OIH. However, whether ketamine enantiomers could alleviate OIH through gut microbiota that still needs to be...
The mechanisms underlying esketamine's therapeutic effects remain elusive. The study aimed to explore the impact of single esketamine treatment on LPS-induced adolescent depressive-like behaviors and the role of Nrf2 regulated neuroinflammatory response in esketamine-produced rapid antidepressant efficacy. Adolescent male C57BL/6J mice were randomly assigned to three groups: control, LPS, and...
NeuroscienceFebruary 6, 2025Carolina Echeverry, Mariana Pazos, Maximiliano Torres-Pérez et al.9 citations
Neurodegenerative diseases are a group of disorders characterized by progressive degeneration of discrete groups of neurons causing severe disability. The main risk factor is age, hence their incidence is rapidly increasing worldwide due to the rise in life expectancy. Although the causes of the disease are not identified in about 90% of the cases, in the last decades there has been great...
NeuroscienceJanuary 9, 2025Alireza Mohammad Hosseini, Hossein Khaleghzadeh-Ahangar, Atena Rahimi
Dementia is an increasing disorder, and Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the cause of 60% of all dementia cases. Despite all efforts, there is no cure for stopping dementia progression. Recent studies reported potential effects of psychedelics on neuroinflammation during AD. Psychedelics by 5HT2AR activation can reduce proinflammatory cytokine levels (TNF-α, IL-6) and inhibit neuroinflammation. In...
NeuroscienceDecember 17, 2024Erin B Rousseau, Hannah D Jackson, Suman Guha et al.
Targeted intracranial delivery of molecularly-specific therapies within intricate brain structures poses a formidable challenge due to the heterogeneity of neuronal phenotypes and functions. Here we report the use of an implantable, miniaturized neural drug delivery system permitting dynamic adjustment of pharmacotherapies. Specifically, we exploit the spatial accuracy afforded by this method...
Characterizing the relationship between the brain and the mind is essential, both for understanding how we experience sensations and for attempts to create machine-based artificial intelligence. Materialists argue that the brain and the mind are both physical/material in nature whereas Cartesian dualists posit that the brain is material, the mind is non-material, and that they are separate....
There are currently no pharmacological treatments for cocaine use disorder. Recently there has been a great deal of interest in the potential of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin to treat psychiatric disorders. Human studies have indicated that a single administration of psilocybin can have long-lasting effects. Few preclinical studies have examined a role for psilocybin in addiction models....
NeuroscienceNovember 1, 2024Vishal Bharmauria, Hamidreza Ramezanpour, Afef Ouelhazi et al.
Ketamine is a widely used clinical drug that has several functional and clinical applications, including its use as an anaesthetic, analgesic, anti-depressive, anti-suicidal agent, among others. Among its diverse behavioral effects, it influences short-term memory and induces psychedelic effects. At the neural level across different brain areas, it modulates neural firing rates, neural tuning,...
NeuroscienceMay 14, 2024Muwang Ye, Anhui Wang, Haiyang Liang et al.3 citations
Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) is an important way to understand the fundamental nature of consciousness. By recording event-related potentials (ERPs) using EEG, researchers have found three potential electrophysiological NCCs: early positive correlate of consciousness (enhanced P1), visual awareness negativity (VAN), and late positivity (LP). However, LP may reflect...
Psilocybin has received attention as a treatment for depression, stress disorders and drug and alcohol addiction. To help determine the mechanisms underlying its therapeutic effects, here we examined acute effects of a range of behaviourally relevant psilocybin doses (0.1-3 mg/kg SC) on regional expression of Fos, the protein product of the immediate early gene, c-fos in brain areas involved in...