Comment

Across the globe, human environments and experiences are diverse and undergoing rapid transformation. With the growing prevalence of neurological and mental health challenges, there is now an urgent imperative to understand the impacts of this diversity and change on the brain. This will require large-scale and long-term global studies of neural activity coupled with measures of lifestyle and life experience, environmental exposures, and mental and cognitive outcomes across diverse populations that lend themselves to untangling multivariate effects. We describe our experience developing large-scale EEG neuroimaging data acquisition programs in India and Tanzania and highlight key considerations for ensuring that such programs are ethically sound, cost-effective, scalable, adaptable and capable of producing high-quality data.

Psychedelic science is growing rapidly and offers great promise for exciting new therapies, but this rapid growth has brought growing pains. These include a lack of appreciation of the history of the field and what has already been accomplished, and a lack of understanding of the pharmacology of psychedelics and 5-HT_2A receptors. These gaps must be recognized, acknowledged and addressed in order for the field to advance responsibly.

This Comment calls on scientists to acknowledge how insufficient communication and limited engagement beyond academia have deepened the divide between science and the public. Restoring trust requires a paradigm shift in which scientists accept that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility — critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve.

The promise of genomics-focused neuroscience to improve health outcomes for Indigenous Peoples depends on ensuring more equitable data relationships though culturally appropriate data governance and the technical infrastructure to enable its implementation. Although ethical frameworks and legal policy mechanisms affirm Indigenous rights, there is a persistent gap in translating these commitments into practice. Here we discuss how embedding Indigenous data governance across research infrastructures and data ecosystems is needed to strengthen the field’s capacity to deliver beneficial outcomes for all.

Researchers’ access to scientific research findings remains inequitable owing to financial and geographical barriers, highlighting the need for more sustainable and inclusive modes of communication to complement existing journals and conferences. Free, online webinar platforms offer a powerful way to democratize scientific knowledge and support career development globally. Drawing from our experience building Open Box Science — a not-for-profit grassroots organization that has hosted over 250 webinars for audiences from more than 70 countries — and examining other successful initiatives, we share practical insights on how to build thriving communities for scientific exchange and call for the continuous support of such platforms. We also highlight how early-career scientists can leverage such platforms to expand their network and enrich their perspectives.

A recent article makes a claim with far-reaching implications for neuroscience, technology, and society: that the human brain is subject to an information processing ‘speed limit’ of 10 bits per second. Although this speed limit appears to hold for high-level cognitive functions, we argue that unconscious processing for real-time control of movement, which occupies a majority of neurons in the central nervous system and accounts for most of the information throughput of humans, substantially exceeds this limit.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, a shift from traditional in-person conferences to virtual and hybrid formats was welcomed for its accessible, cost-effective approach to sharing scientific knowledge and connecting people. Here, we discuss an effective hybrid format that combines in-person and online elements to foster inclusivity by providing a flexible, cost-effective alternative to in-person meetings.

The nervous system can drive the initiation, growth, spread, and therapy resistance of cancer, and cancer can manipulate the nervous system in ways that further support disease progression. Tumors growing within the brain or elsewhere in the body connect with neuronal networks in circuit-specific manners, via neuron-to-cancer synaptic interactions and paracrine crosstalk. Moreover, neural factors govern critical components of the tumor environment, such as the immune system, and cancer can use neural mechanisms in a malignant cell-intrinsic manner. Here we provide a personal view on the burgeoning field of cancer neuroscience and highlight the need to approach cancer research from a neuroscience perspective — together with neuroscientists.

The scientific study of consciousness was sanctioned as an orthodox field of study only three decades ago. Since then, a variety of prominent theories have flourished, including integrated information theory, which has been recently accused of being pseudoscience by more than 100 academics. Here we critically assess this charge and offer thoughts to elevate the clash into positive lessons for our field.

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness, which is subjective, and accounts for its presence and quality in objective, testable terms. Attempts to label as ‘pseudoscientific’ a theory distinguished by decades of conceptual, mathematical, and empirical developments expose a crisis in the dominant computational-functionalist paradigm, which is challenged by IIT’s consciousness-first paradigm.

Launched in 2013, the BRAIN Initiative (BRAIN) in the United States aimed to unlock the mysteries of the brain and develop new treatments for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The success of this program is evidenced by the accelerated discoveries and development of interventions that are happening in real time. However, a recent 40% cut in funding for BRAIN threatens this once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve fundamental mysteries of the brain and achieve treatment breakthroughs that we once thought impossible.

Undergraduate research programs improve career outcomes for historically marginalized students in the US, but low retention rates in postgraduate research persist. As graduate students and postdocs, we present a combination of trainee-informed approaches for tailoring summer research programs to these students’ needs and share key materials to facilitate adoption of these approaches at other institutions.

The increased inclusion of samples from individuals from minoritized communities in biomedical research will help to mitigate health disparities that stem from a medical enterprise founded in racism and exclusion. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Benjamin et al. investigate how genetic ancestry influences the expression of genes in the brain, an effort supported by community leaders who raised funding, partnered in shaping research questions and had a central role in the interpretation and communication of the study’s findings. Here, we outline the public and social context that motivated these efforts towards ensuring equitable access to the benefits of science for all.

Effective science communication is necessary for engaging the public in scientific discourse and ensuring equitable access to knowledge. Training doctoral students in science communication will instill principles of accessibility, accountability, and adaptability in the next generation of scientific leaders, who are poised to expand science’s reach, generate public support for research funding, and counter misinformation. To this aim, we provide a guide for implementing formal science communication training for doctoral students.

The study of the female brain during pregnancy and motherhood is gaining traction, and holds the potential to address the unmet needs of millions of women worldwide. Here we highlight the most pressing gaps in this field. Filling these knowledge gaps will require two paths forward: focused longitudinal studies that deeply characterize individuals, and collaborative initiatives that build large-scale international databases.

Neuroscience research is affected by a substantial racial bias, but there are major challenges involved in minimizing this bias. Here we discuss these challenges and call for a global discussion that develops answers to these challenges and defines best practices for how researchers can better represent human diversity and work against medical racism. This global discussion should involve researchers from medicine, life sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as well as people with lived experience and health equity activists, to improve racial and ethnic equity in neuroscience research and beyond.

The neuroscience of hormonal contraceptives is a vital but relatively new field. Existing studies are limited in size and scope, but they nonetheless highlight that the effects of hormonal contraceptives on the nervous system are complex and can vary because of individual differences, contraceptive type and formulation, and timing of use, among other factors. Neuroscientists can empower individuals with information about the biopsychological effects of hormonal contraceptives by delving more deeply into these effects in rigorous randomized controlled trials, large-scale studies that examine population-level trends, and dense imaging or intensive longitudinal studies that examine individual-level effects.

In the case that led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade, the State of Mississippi made the strong claim that fetuses can feel pain. We argue that critical biological evidence used to support this claim was misinterpreted and that the State’s argument conflated pain and nociception. Abortion policy has profound moral and ethical consequences and therefore needs to be grounded in the most accurate scientific arguments, as well as a clear understanding of what we mean when we use the term pain.