Browse Articles

Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence that, rather that being the end stage of perception, categorization occurs throughout signal processing and is a core computational strategy of the brain.

Perturbing female Drosophila behaviour during courtship induces adaptive changes in innate male fly courtship song patterns; these changes are initially retained in subsequent courtship encounters with normal female behaviour, but songs gradually return to innate patterns.

Despite rapid exploitation of the opportunities that contextualization of brain maps affords, potential limitations have received little attention. In this Roadmap, Royer et al. provide practical guidelines operating at the level of study design, analysis pipelines and interpretation of findings to encourage the development of best practices in data contextualization in neuroscience.

Single-nucleus sequencing reveals age- and disease-related changes in the molecular regulation of neurogenesis associated with cognitive decline and resilience.

Astrocytic Ca²⁺ signalling is a fundamental and highly spatiotemporally nuanced mechanism for maintaining brain homeostasis. In this Review, Bacskai and colleagues discuss how astrocytic Ca²⁺ homeostasis is altered in ageing and neurodegenerative diseases and plays a central role in neurodegenerative pathophysiology.

Appeals to representation are widespread, despite neuroscientists’ uncertainty about what kind of findings count as evidence for such claims. In this Perspective, Pohl and colleagues develop a unified framework that distinguishes four conceptual dimensions relevant to representation, illustrating them in information-theoretic terms to explicitly characterize representation in neuroscience.

A new study in mice reveals a neuron–epithelial cell circuit in the intestine that promotes type 2 immunity.

In this Journal Club, Sora Shin discusses a 2025 paper that shows that the lateral parabrachial nucleus has a key role in regulating persistent pain in a need-state-dependent manner.

Rising environmental temperatures challenge nervous systems. We examine how neural systems enable acclimation to prolonged heat exposure, the limits of such adaptation, and the behavioural and social strategies that shape heat resilience. Understanding the neural mechanisms of adaptation to heat may inform strategies to cope with a warming world.

Dorsal medial prefrontal cortex simultaneously yet independently encodes interconnected attributes of environmental cues to motivate appetitive and aversive behaviour in mice via multifaceted representations.

Mitochondria make essential contributions to neural development. Zhao and colleagues provide an overview of the mechanisms that regulate mitochondrial biogenesis, degradation, remodelling and transport, the importance of these processes for neural development and the proposed links between altered mitochondrial dynamics and neurodevelopmental disorders.

The neuronal circuits that comprise the spinal cord central pattern generator (CPG) orchestrate the rhythmic and coordinated motor activity that underlies locomotion. El Manira describes recent advances in our understanding of the organization and operation of the CPG, highlighting findings that have revealed its distributed, modular and adaptable nature.

Brain activity in regions traditionally linked to social cognition in primates also supports analogous computational demands in non-social contexts. In this Perspective, Mahmoodi and Rushworth examine the computations required to navigate the social lives of human and non-human primates, arguing how shared neural mechanisms carrying out similar computations in non-social contexts indicate computational rather than contextual specialization in the ‘social brain’.

In this Journal Club, Lihua Ye highlights a 2016 paper that characterized the vagal sensory neuron subtypes that transmit different sensory signals from the digestive tract, advancing our understanding of gut–brain communication.

Guidance is lacking on how to best integrate sex, gender and social and structural determinants of health into neuroscience research on brain resilience in ageing and dementia. In this Roadmap article, Rajah et al. propose a way forward for conducting more inclusive research in this field.

In mice, the sensory neurons that innervate the skeleton signal via FGF9 to promote bone repair after fracture.