Reviews & Analysis

Many physical, social, lifestyle and systemic body factors — collectively termed the ‘exposome’ — can influence brain and behavioural phenotypes across the lifespan. In this Perspective, Sarah Genon and colleagues examine how we can gain a better understanding of the exposome’s neurocognitive effects.

Structured social hierarchies, in which individuals differ in their access to resources and influence over other group members, are a characteristic of many social species. Rongzhen Yan and Dayu Lin describe the diverse routes through which social hierarchies arise in different species and outline our current understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms.

The auditory system differs from other senses in the complexity of its subcortical pathways. King and colleagues examine how subcortical structures transform sound representations and integrate sensory and behavioural context, highlighting their fundamental role in shaping cortical activity and in active listening.

Recent advances in large-scale electrophysiology now enable researchers to record from thousands of neurons distributed across the brain. Siegle and Steinmetz describe the principles underlying this technology and outline the key considerations, challenges and opportunities associated with collecting, analysing and sharing large electrophysiological datasets.

Lung diseases drive substantial hospitalization, but available therapies remain limited. In this Review, Talbot and colleagues highlight pulmonary neuroimmunology — the bidirectional crosstalk between lung-innervating neurons and immune cells — and discuss how this axis may open new avenues for disease-modifying therapies.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

The dynamic and versatile architecture of the neuronal endoplasmic reticulum (ER) enables it to support a wide range of functions. In this Review, Carvalhais, Kole and Kuijpers describe the mechanisms that shape ER morphology and its contributions to specific local functions within neuronal subcellular domains.

Connectome reconstructions across multiple species reveal that the morphology of axonal projections is highly variable, even between neurons of the same location or subtype. In this Review, Richards et al. discuss the implications of this for interareal communication and for functional network plasticity in both the healthy brain and following brain injury.

Recent evidence suggests that astrocytes, through coordinated activation in sparse ensembles, contribute to memory traces — termed ‘astro-neuronal engrams’. In this Perspective, Sánchez Romero and Navarrete discuss supporting evidence for astro-neuronal engrams and how these findings challenge traditional neurocentric models of memory.

Maladaptive central autonomic remodelling that occurs in response to heart failure and hypertension drives sympathetic overactivity and cardiac dysfunction. In this Review, van Weperen and Vaseghi discuss the neural, glial and molecular mechanisms underlying these changes, as well as emerging neuromodulatory strategies aimed at restoring autonomic balance.

Neural decoding remains constrained by methods that miss the brain’s chemical signalling dimension. In this Review, Kim and Park discuss hybrid and transformative neurochemical interfaces that provide real-time access to the brain’s dynamic molecular activity.

Connectomics has delivered on its promise to map neuronal circuits at scale and at synaptic resolution. In this Review, Helmstaedter describes recent methodological achievements and remaining challenges in synaptic-resolution connectomics while synthesizing expanding connectomic mapping ambitions that include resolving local circuits of larger brains and screening of connectomes.

The thermosensory system across insects and mammals has shared principles of neuronal wiring and encoding. In this Review, Carta, Vestergaard and Poulet discuss how the nervous systems of insects and mammals process the thermal information that underlies thermal perception.