How individual neurons respond to brain rhythms is crucial to uncovering how the brain supports real-time navigation. New research shows that hippocampal neurons can process information from multiple brain rhythms simultaneously, revealing how the brain organizes thoughts, memory and behavior. This discovery offers a new understanding of how the brain organizes thoughts for navigation, memories and behaviors and may have important significance for neurological conditions implicated to spatial memory and learning like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

A patch containing tens of millions of microscopic nanoneedles could soon replace traditional biopsies, scientists have found. The patch offers a painless and less invasive alternative for millions of patients worldwide who undergo biopsies each year to detect and monitor diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

In a study that holds significance for individuals with cerebrovascular disease, scientists from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), have found proteins in the blood that predict future cognitive decline and dementia.

Effective memory formation declines as we age, in part because our ability to form representations in the brain is diminished with a decline in neural selectivity, or the extent to which some neurons or cortical regions respond more strongly than others to specific stimuli. Now, Jintao Sheng and colleagues suggest that protein pathologies related to Alzheimer’s disease and age-related changes in top-down or voluntarily directed attention can affect neural selectivity in cognitively unimpaired people. In their study of 166 such participants, Sheng et al. found these changes contributed to reduced episodic memory performance. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the participants as they performed a word-face/word-place associative memory task. They found that changes in top-down attention that seemed to broaden activity across preferred and non-preferred stimuli, as well as elevated plasma levels of the Alzheimer’s-associated protein Tau181, independently affected age-related episodic memory decline. Sheng et al. note that these factors “alter the precision of cortical representations of event features during experience, with consequences for future remembering.”