Neurons are the cells in the brain responsible for sending messages to the rest of the body, and scientists have long thought that they are settled into one subtype once they develop from stem cells, no matter what is happening ...
Apr 1, 2025
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New research led by the University of Portsmouth has revealed how Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), best known for causing severe muscle degeneration, also profoundly affects the brain, leading to cognitive and behavioral ...
Mar 28, 2025
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The parts of the brain that are needed to remember words, and how these are affected by a common form of epilepsy, have been identified by a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons at UCL.
Mar 19, 2025
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How a person's brain grows and makes connections can determine intelligence as well as susceptibility to disorders such as epilepsy and mental illness. However, a lot of questions remain about how the process works, especially ...
Mar 18, 2025
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In a new study reported in Science Advances, scientists analyzed MRI data stored at the UK Biobank and identified seven genes responsible for fast biological brain aging and 13 existing drugs that can target those genes.
Birth is one of the most critical moments in a person's life. During this transition, a baby moves from receiving oxygen through the umbilical cord to breathing on their own. Most of the time this shift happens smoothly, ...
Mar 12, 2025
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COVID-19 affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide and is often associated with long-term neurological abnormalities. Common symptoms include the loss of taste and smell, dizziness, "brain fog", headache, confusion, ...
Mar 11, 2025
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The SYNGAP1 gene, which supports the production of a protein called SynGAP (Synaptic Ras GTPase-Activating Protein), is known to play a key role in supporting the development of synapses and neural circuits (i.e., connections ...
The cerebral cortex is the largest part of a mammal's brain, and by some measures, the most important. In humans in particular, it's where most things happen—like perception, thinking, memory storage and decision-making.
Feb 10, 2025
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Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center (SWC) at UCL have unveiled the precise brain mechanisms that enable animals to overcome instinctive fears. Published in Science, the study in mice could have implications for developing ...
Feb 6, 2025
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The cerebral cortex is a structure within the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. It constitutes the outermost layer of the cerebrum. In preserved brains, it has a grey color, hence the name "grey matter". Grey matter is formed by neurons and their unmyelinated fibers, whereas the white matter below the grey matter of the cortex is formed predominantly by myelinated axons interconnecting different regions of the central nervous system. The human cerebral cortex is 2–4 mm (0.08–0.16 inches) thick.
The surface of the cerebral cortex is folded in large mammals, such that more than two-thirds of the cortical surface is buried in the grooves, called "sulci." The phylogenetically most recent part of the cerebral cortex, the neocortex, also called isocortex, is differentiated into six horizontal layers; the more ancient part of the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus (also called archicortex), has at most three cellular layers, and is divided into subfields. Relative variations in thickness or cell type (among other parameters) allow us to distinguish between different neocortical architectonic fields. The geometry of at least some of these fields seems to be related to the anatomy of the cortical folds, and, for example, layers in the upper part of the cortical ridges (called gyri) seem to be more clearly differentiated than in its deeper parts.
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