🧠 Category

neuroscience

1795 papers

Neuroscience explores the intricate machinery of the brain and nervous system, seeking to understand how we think, feel, and move. From the microscopic dance of individual neurons to the complex networks that shape our memories and behaviors, this field peels back the layers of our biological selves to reveal the origins of consciousness and disease.

At Gist.Science, we bring these discoveries directly from bioRxiv, the leading preprint server for biological sciences, to a broader audience. We process every new neuroscience preprint as it is uploaded, transforming dense academic manuscripts into clear, plain-language explanations alongside detailed technical summaries. This ensures that both curious readers and specialists can stay current with the latest breakthroughs before they are formally published.

Below are the latest neuroscience papers we have processed from bioRxiv, offering fresh insights into the workings of the mind.

🧠 neuroscience

Early intervention with a PACAP lactoside following repetitive mild traumatic brain injury prevents persistent LHb hyperactivity and motivational deficits in male mice

This study demonstrates that early intervention with a novel PAC1R agonist (TES2320) following repetitive mild traumatic brain injury in male mice prevents persistent lateral habenula hyperactivity and motivational deficits by restoring PACAP signaling, whereas late intervention fails to improve these outcomes and may induce adverse behavioral effects.

Thomas, E., Smith, T., Szabo, L., Flerlage, W., Al-Obeidi, F., Rujan, O., Gouty, S., Armstrong, R., Cox, B., Falk, T., H (…)2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Tau Disaggregation by a CNS-Permeable Small Molecule Reduces Fibril and Oligomer Burden and Preserves Proteostasis and Behavior

This study reports the development of PT-13, a brain-penetrant coumarin-based small molecule that safely disaggregates pathological tau fibrils and oligomers via a stacking-driven co-assembly mechanism, thereby reducing tau burden and preserving behavioral and cellular function in a tauopathy mouse model.

Mostowfi, N., Foreman, R., Wang, J., Khoury, R., Albanese, A., Ma, Q. L., Cohn, W., Petzinger, G., Jakowec, M. W., Ahmed (…)2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Assessing specificity testing in Lesion Network Mapping

This paper clarifies the relationship between specificity testing and other Lesion Network Mapping (LNM) variants while demonstrating that persistent repetition in LNM specificity networks reveals a fundamental disease-specificity limitation, thereby highlighting the need for new methodological approaches to identify brain circuits underlying neurological and psychiatric disorders.

van den Heuvel, M., Libedinsky, I., Quiroz, S., Repple, J., Cocchi, L.2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Sport expertise and motor imagery abilities shape sensorimotor rhythm modulations during visualisation tasks: Implications for neurofeedback-based cognitive training in athletes

This study demonstrates that while sport expertise enhances sensorimotor rhythm desynchronization during task-specific motor imagery, higher individual imagery ability correlates with reduced activation, suggesting that neurofeedback training protocols should be tailored to an athlete's specific expertise and imagery proficiency.

Izac, M., Pierrieau, E., Rossignol, E., Grechukhin, N., Coudroy, E., Pillette, L., N'Kaoua, B., Jeunet-Kelway, C.2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Entorhinal grid coding as a functional link between tau accumulation and episodic memory in human aging

This study demonstrates that in cognitively normal older adults, tau accumulation in the medial temporal lobe impairs episodic memory by disrupting entorhinal grid-cell-like signals, establishing these neural codes as a functional link between early pathology and memory decline.

Segen, V., Belge Bernard, T., Callau Navarro, G., Bahrd, P., Behrenbruch, N., Schumann-Werner, B., Schwarck, S., Garcia- (…)2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Dendritic hotspots support switching between competing rules without expanding the cortical engram

This study demonstrates that dendritic hotspots in the secondary motor cortex enable efficient rule-switching by allowing the replacement of prior rule-encoding spines with new ones within stable, reusable domains, thereby supporting adaptive behavior without expanding the overall cortical engram.

Pandi, I., Chavlis, S., Oraby, H., Nashaat, M. A., Larkum, M., Papoutsi, A., Poirazi, P.2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Long-term mitigation of the foreign-body response with dexamethasone-eluting cochlear implants in mice

This study demonstrates that dexamethasone-eluting cochlear implants provide sustained, long-term suppression of the foreign-body response, including macrophage infiltration, fibrosis, and neo-ossification, in mice for up to 336 days, supporting their potential for clinical translation.

Alluri, A., Hunger, B., Hossain, m. F., Fatima, S. M., Rahman, M. T., Gay, R., Mostaert, B. J., Enke, Y. L., Hansen, M. (…)2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Spacing theta-burst stimulation enhances synaptic potentiation in the vulnerable prefrontal cortex

This study demonstrates that while standard intermittent theta-burst stimulation fails to reliably induce synaptic potentiation in the prefrontal cortex of socially isolated mice due to dysregulated calcium dynamics, a modified "spaced" iTBS protocol with fewer stimuli and longer intervals successfully overcomes this vulnerability to enhance long-term potentiation.

Zolis, A., Hsieh, A. H.-Y., Venkatesan, S., Ingram, R., Georgiou, J., Zrenner, C., Collingridge, G. L., Rajji, T. K., La (…)2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Anxiety-Related Traits Are Associated with Subjective Biases but not Altered Threat-Safety Discrimination

In a well-powered study of 267 participants, anxiety-related traits were found to be associated with a generalized cognitive bias toward heightened threat expectancy and evaluation across subjective measures, rather than with altered physiological fear learning or impaired threat-safety discrimination.

Ehlers, M. R., Stiffel, H., Kastrinogiannis, A., Koppold, A., Lonsdorf, T. B.2026-09-01
🧠 neuroscience

Linking continuous behavior to aesthetic enjoyment in a walkable virtual-reality museum tour: effects of agency and a painting-level analysis framework

This study investigates the impact of user agency and continuous behavioral metrics on aesthetic enjoyment in a virtual reality museum tour, finding that while agency significantly alters viewing patterns, it does not reliably increase self-reported enjoyment, and gaze engagement during audio guides serves as the strongest predictor of liking among behavioral measures.

Sklyar, Y., Hendler, S., Schonberg, T.2026-09-01