Although many studies approach the developmental disorder Rett syndrome as a single condition arising from general loss of function in a gene that regulates brain development and function, a new study by MIT neuroscientists shows that two different mutations of the gene MECP2 caused many distinct abnormalities in lab cultures. The study also found that correcting key differences made by each mutation required different treatments.
“Individual mutations matter,” says Mriganka Sur, senior author of the new open-access study in Nature Communications and the Newton Professor in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This is an approach to personalizing treatment, even for a single-gene disorder.”
The study employed advanced 3D human brain tissue cultures called “organoids” or “minibrains” derived from skin cells or blood cells donated by Rett syndrome patients with each mutation.
Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/rett-syndrome-study-highlights-potential-personalized-treatments
Animal behavior reflects a complex interplay between an animal’s brain and its sensory surroundings. Only rarely have scientists been able to discern how actions emerge from this interaction. A new open-access study in Nature Neuroscience by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT offers one example by revealing how circuits of neurons within C. elegans nematode worms respond to odors and generate movement as they pursue of smells they like and evade ones they don’t.
“Across the animal kingdom, there are just so many remarkable behaviors,” says study senior author Steven Flavell, associate professor in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “With modern neuroscience tools, we are finally gaining the ability to map their mechanistic underpinnings.”
By the end of the study, which former graduate student Talya Kramer PhD ’25 led as her doctoral thesis research, the team was able to show exactly which neurons in the worm’s brain did which of the jobs needed to sense where smells were coming from, plan turns toward or away from them, shift to reverse (like old-fashioned radio-controlled cars, C. elegans worms turn in reverse), execute the turns, and then go back to moving forward. Not only did the study reveal the sequence and each neuron’s role in it, but it also demonstrated that worms are more skillful and intentional in these actions than perhaps they’ve received credit for. And finally, the study demonstrated that it’s all coordinated by the neuromodulatory chemical tyramine.
“One thing that really excited us about this study is that we were able to see what a sensorimotor arc looks like at the scale of a whole nervous system: all the bits and pieces, from responses to the sensory cue until the behavioral response is implemented,” Flavell says.
Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/navigating-nematodes-scientists-map-out-how-brains-implement-behaviors
For students who are struggling with reading, using text-supplemented audiobooks can help dramatically, but only when paired with one-on-one instruction, according to a new study from MIT researchers.
Ola Ozernov-Palchik and Halie Olson, scientists in the lab of Grover M. Hermann Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences John Gabrieli, launched the audiobook study in 2020, when most schools in the United States had closed to slow the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic meant the researchers would not be able to ask families to visit an MIT lab to participate in the study — but it also underscored the urgency of understanding which educational technologies are effective, and for whom.
The study found that Children who were poor readers showed no improvement from audiobooks alone, but did make significant gains in vocabulary when the audiobooks were paired with one-on-one instruction. Even good readers learned more vocabulary when they received tutoring, although the differences for this group were less dramatic. The group’s findings were reported in the journal Developmental Science.
“It is an exciting moment in this ed-tech space,” says Gabrieli, who is an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute. “The admirable goal in all this is: Can we use technology to help kids progress, especially kids who are behind for one reason or another?”
Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/learning-audiobooks
With navigating nematodes, scientists map out how brains implement behaviors. A new MIT study from the lab of Steven Flavell maps exactly what happens in the brains of C. elegans worms when they “follow their nose” to savor attractive odors or avoid unappealing ones. #neuroscience @mitscience@mit_bcs Find out more via link in our bio
One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is difficulty incorporating new information about the world. This can lead people with schizophrenia to struggle with making decisions and, eventually, to lose touch with reality.
MIT neuroscientists have now identified a gene mutation that appears to give rise to this type of difficulty. In a study of mice, the researchers found that the mutated gene impairs the function of a brain circuit that is responsible for updating beliefs based on new input.
This mutation, in a gene called grin2a, was originally identified in a large-scale screen of patients with schizophrenia. The new study suggests that drugs targeting this brain circuit could help with some of the cognitive impairments seen in people with schizophrenia.
“If this circuit doesn’t work well, you cannot quickly integrate information,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “We are quite confident this circuit is one of the mechanisms that contributes to the cognitive impairment that is a major part of the pathology of schizophrenia.”
Feng is a senior author of the new study, which appeared in the journal "Nature Neuroscience." Tingting Zhou, a research scientist at the McGovern Institute, and Yi-Yun Ho, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper.
More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/brain-circuit-needed-incorporate-new-information-may-be-linked-schizophrenia
When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study.
This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while they are undergoing anesthesia.
“What’s exciting about that is the possibility of a universal anesthesia-delivery system that can measure this one signal and tell how unconscious you are, regardless of which drugs they’re using in the operating room,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
Miller, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience Emery Brown, and their colleagues are now working on an automated control system for delivery of anesthesia drugs, which would measure the brain’s stability using EEG and then automatically adjust the drug dose. This could help doctors ensure that patients stay unconscious throughout surgery without becoming too deeply unconscious, which can have negative side effects following the procedure.
Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study, which appeared in the journal "Cell Reports." MIT graduate student Adam Eisen is the paper’s lead author.
More: https://news.mit.edu/2026/three-anesthesia-drugs-all-have-same-effect-brain-0317
MIT neuroscientists have figured out how the brain is able to focus on a single voice among a cacophony of many voices, shedding light on a longstanding neuroscientific phenomenon known as the "cocktail party problem."
This attentional focus becomes necessary when you’re in any crowded environment, such as a cocktail party, with many conversations going on at once. Somehow, your brain is able to follow the voice of the person you’re talking to, despite all the other voices that you’re hearing in the background.
Using a computational model of the auditory system, the MIT team found that amplifying the activity of the neural processing units that respond to features of a target voice, such as its pitch, allows that voice to be boosted to the forefront of attention.
“That simple motif is enough to cause much of the phenotype of human auditory attention to emerge, and the model ends up reproducing a very wide range of human attentional behaviors for sound,” says Josh McDermott, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and the senior author of the study.
The findings are consistent with previous studies showing that when people or animals focus on a specific auditory input, neurons in the auditory cortex that respond to features of the target stimulus amplify their activity. This is the first study to show that extra boost is enough to explain how the brain solves the cocktail party problem.
Ian Griffith, a graduate student in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Biosciences and Technology, who is advised by McDermott, is the lead author of the paper. MIT graduate student R. Preston Hess is also an author of the paper, which appeared in Nature Human Behavior.
More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/how-brain-handles-cocktail-party-problem
When learning a new skill, the brain has to decide—cell by cell—what to change. New research from MIT suggests it can do that with surprising precision, sending targeted feedback to individual neurons so each one can adjust its activity in the right direction.
The finding echoes a key idea from modern artificial intelligence. Many AI systems learn by comparing their output to a target, computing an “error” signal, and using it to fine-tune connections within the network. A longstanding question has been whether the brain also uses that kind of individualized feedback. In a study published in the February 25 issue of the journal Nature, MIT researchers report evidence that it does.
A research team led by Mark Harnett, a McGovern Institute investigator and associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, discovered these instructive signals in mice by training animals to control the activity of specific neurons using a brain-computer interface (BCI).
Their approach, the researchers say, can be used to further study the relationships between artificial neural networks and real brains, in ways that are expected to both improve understanding of biological learning and enable better brain-inspired artificial intelligence.
Read more: https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2026/02/25/neurons-learn/
The ability to use language to communicate is one of things that makes us human. At MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, scientists led by Evelina Fedorenko have defined an entire network of areas within the brain dedicated to this ability, which work together when we speak, listen, read, write, or sign.
Much of the language network lies within the brain’s neocortex, where many of our most sophisticated cognitive functions are carried out. Now, Fedorenko’s lab, which is part of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has identified language-processing regions within the cerebellum, extending the language network to a part of the brain better known for helping to coordinate the body’s movements. Their findings are reported in the journal Neuron.
“It’s like there’s this region in the cerebellum that we’ve been forgetting about for a long time,” says Colton Casto, a graduate student who works in Fedorenko’s lab. “If you’re a language researcher, you should be paying attention to the cerebellum.”
More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/satellite-language-network-brain
BCS Professor and McGovern Institute Investigator Feng Zhang has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his innovations in gene editing and for sharing his resources and expertise broadly with the global scientific community.
Zhang has invented transformative technologies to improve human health, including first demonstrating the use of engineered CRISPR-Cas9 systems for genome editing in human cells. He has co-founded several companies to commercialize these technologies. Through the nonprofit repository Addgene, by 2023 over 75,000 samples of Zhang’s reagents had been shared with researchers in more than 79 countries. He also has trained scientists from around the world in online research forums, in his workshops and in his lab. He is among 15 innovators inducted in the 2026 class inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
“My mother would always emphasize that I should choose to do something useful for the world; to live a life that is meaningful and is adding something to the world, rather than just consuming from the world,” Zhang says. “That has been one of the strongest guiding factors for me.”
Zhang is the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and has joint appointments in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering. He is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT.
More: https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2026/02/03/feng-zhang-inducted-into-the-national-inventors-hall-of-fame/
The signals that drive many of the brain and body’s most essential functions—consciousness, sleep, breathing, heart rate and motion—course through bundles of “white matter” fibers in the brainstem, but imaging systems so far have been unable to finely resolve these crucial neural cables. That has left researchers and doctors with little capability to assess how they are affected by trauma or neurodegeneration. In a new study, a team of MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers unveil AI-powered software capable of automatically segmenting eight distinct bundles in any diffusion MRI sequence. In the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences, the research team led by MIT graduate student Mark Olchanyi reports that their BrainStem Bundle Tool (BSBT), which they’ve made publicly available, revealed distinct patterns of structural changes in patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and traumatic brain injury and shed light on Alzheimer’s disease as well. Find out more via the link in our bio. #neuroscience #neurology #radiology @mit_bcs@mitscience@imes_mit
As Karla Perez neared the finish line for her bachelor's degree, she knew she wanted to dive deeper into cognitive science, but she wasn't quite sure how to take the plunge.
"I knew that studying the mind is a huge enterprise and that it's something I could see myself doing, but I hadn't had the opportunity to study the scientific fields that comprise our current knowledge of the mind," she says.
Then, she learned about the Research Scholars Program in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
As a Research Scholar, she spent two years designing experiments and interpreting data, all under the guidance of world-renowned faculty and mentors. Today, she is pursuing a PhD in psychology at Stanford University.
“The Research Scholars Program instilled in me the spirit of a scientist,” Perez says. “Science requires patience, diligence, and resilience, and the Research Scholars Program allowed me to exercise these qualities, over and over again. As I did, I grew more confident in my capacity as a researcher and was able to truly appreciate and love the process.”
The Research Scholars Program is a two-year, fully funded post-baccalaureate program designed to provide access to top-tier research experiences for individuals who have demonstrated exceptional academic potential in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, and neuroengineering despite facing significant hardships. The program has a strong track record of sending scholars on to top-ranked PhD programs in cognitive science and neuroscience.
Think the program sounds like a good fit for you? There is still time to apply for the next academic year! The application period closes Feb. 15.
Learn more: https://bcs.mit.edu/postbac1
#NeuroStudents #ResearchOpportunities #cognitivescience #postbac
