Shows / This Week in Neuroscience
Episodes
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 76: Light Switches Go To Stockholm
TWiN explains the science behind the 2026 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries on light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Hosts: Vincent…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 75: Arc, tau, and Alzheimer's
Jason Shepherd joins TWiN to discuss the work in his laboratory showing that Arc protein plays a role in intercellular transmission of tau protein, which…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 74: Plastic astrocyte networks with Melissa Cooper
Melissa Cooper joins TWiN to discuss her discovery that astrocytes connect specific brain regions through plastic networks. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Tim…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 73: The price of a bigger brain
TWiN unpacks a striking paradox, that the very cell divisions that built the human brain's most advanced layers also put them at greatest risk, and how a…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 72: What cesarean babies miss
TWiN explains the finding that vaginal microbiota transfer ameliorates cesarean-associated neurodevelopmental deficits in mice via synthesis of a sphingosine…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 71: Psychedelics rewire the brain from within
TWiN explains the finding that activation of intracellular, not plasma membrane, serotonin 2A receptors is responsible for the plasticity-promoting and…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 70: Unraveling the axon wrap
TWiN explains the role of a ubiquitin ligase component in regulating the sheathing of multiple axons by Schwann cells. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Vivianne…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 69: Fibromyalgia and the microbiome
TWiN explains a study which showed that transplanting gut microbiota from women with fibromyalgia into mice induces pain, as well as phenotypes commonly…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 68: Firewall for the brain
TWiN explores the use of speech brain-computer interfaces to restore communication to people with paralysis, and reveals strategies for protecting private…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 67: Interpreting situation-specific facial signals
TWiN explores how theta phase shifts mediate contextual perception of facial expressions during everyday social interactions. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 66: Neuroscience of overeating
TWiN reviews the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of overeating and obesity, the role of the hypothalamus and reward systems in controlling food intake…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 65: Air pollutants promote dementia
TWiN explains epidemiological data showing that exposure to air pollution was associated with an increased risk of developing Lewy body dementia, and nasal…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 64: How the brain decides what we see
TWiN explains how visual neurons show functional flexibility by selectively responding to subsets of inputs representing attended objects while ignoring those…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 63: Microbiome-targeted neurotherapy
TWiN discusses research showing that Lactobacillus acidophilus promotes cognitive function recovery after cerebral ischemia, by regulating microglial…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 62: Memories of bad food
TWiN explains research which identifies the regions of the brain that register a long-lasting aversion to potentially poisonous food even with meal to illness…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 61: Blood to the brain
TWiN reveals that proteins travel from the blood to the brain where they are taken up by microglia, revealing a new mode of communication between the brain and…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 60: You get the gist of it?
TWiN discusses experiments which show that high-fidelity memories that lose their precision with time depends on reorganization of hippocampal circuitry…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 59: AI co-scientist
Tim explains AI co-scientist, a tool released by Google, which it hopes to help scientists generate hypotheses and research proposals, and to accelerate the…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 58: Tongue-dragging rescue behavior
TWiN explains a study showing that when a mouse is confronted with an unconscious conspecific, it engages in behavior including tongue-dragging to resuscitate…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 57: Repetitive injury, herpes, and Alzheimer's
TWiN discusses a study showing that repetitive injury reactivates HSV-1 in a human brain tissue model and induces phenotypes associated with Alzheimer's…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 56: Astrocytes help neurons remember
TWiN explains a study showing that while groups of neurons, form the basis for memory, astrocytes are key components of the adaptive reponse to learning…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 55: A brain circuit for day/night balance
TWiN explains the identification of a brain circuit and periodic branch-specific neurotransmitter deployment that regulates organismal adaptation to…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 54: How pregnancy transforms the brain
TWiN explores how pregnancy leads to modifications in brain structure and function that may prepare the mother for parenting. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Jason…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 53: Slowing time by cooling the brain
Joseph Paton and Felipe Rodrigues join TWiN to explain how they used temperature manipulation to alter the speed of neuronal dynamics in the dorsal striatum of…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 52: Probiotic improves social behavior in children with ASD
Mauro Costa-Mattioli returns to TWiN to discuss the results of a placebo controlled, double blind clinical trial of a probiotic which improved social behavior…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 51: Sensory processing dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders
TWiN reviews altered somatosensory reactivity, which is frequently observed among individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and in mouse models the…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 50: Neurological sequelae after COVID-19
TWiN reviews experiments which show that SARS-CoV-2 triggers the up-regulation of synaptic components and perturbs local electrical field potential in cerebral…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 49: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest mouse of all?
TWiN welcomes mice to the elite club of 'self-aware' animals, with a study demonstrating a mirror-induced self-directed behavior in mice resembling visual…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 48: Traumatic brain injury and retroviruses
TWiN describes a study that reveals activation of endogenous retroviruses in oligodenroglia from patients with traumatic brain injury. Hosts: Vincent…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 47: Walking after spinal cord injury
TWiN explains an amazing study of a man who was paralyzed after a spinal cord injury and regained the ability to walk after implantation of a brain-spinal cord…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 46: Neuronal activity promotes glioma progression
TWiN explains research showing that interaction between glioma cells and neurons in the brain shares mechanistic features with synaptic plasticity that…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 45: Acupuncture modulates the immune system
TWiN discusses research showing that sciatic nerve activation with electroacupuncture at the sciatic nerve controls systemic inflammation and rescues mice from…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 44: ADHD and persistent pain
TWiN reviews a mouse model of ADHD to characterize hypersensitivity to pain, and that sensitization is further amplified in a pathological inflammatory state…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 43: Pavlovian opioid tolerance
TWiN discusses a study of on the pathways that control opioid analgesic tolerance, a root cause of opioid overdose and misuse, which can develop through an…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 42: Therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs
TWiN explains how psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, which are being explored for treating a wide range of neuropsychiatric diseases, reopen…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 41: Alzheimer's and melanin-concentrating hormone
Vivianne explains how early in Alzheimer's disease, the brain attempts to counteract the increased excitatory drive caused by amyloid deposition, and that…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 40: Dopamine organizes behavior's syllables
Tim takes TWiN through two studies on the role of dopamine: that syllables are natural units of spontaneous behavior used by the brain to structure action, and…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 39: Virus-like capsids trigger paraneoplastic disease
Junjie from Jason's lab joins TWiN to discuss the observation that the cell gene PNMA2 encodes non-enveloped virus-like capsids that induce autoantibodies…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 38: Bacterial immunity heals sensory neurons
TWiN explains the finding that immunity to commensal bacteria promotes sensory neuron regeneration via the cytokine interleukin-17A. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 37: Microglia at the crossroads
TWiN reviews the field of microgial research, which has advanced in recent decades but is constrained by nomenclature that is necessary but often implies…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 36: Unbearable neurologists
TWiN answers listener questions about Alzheimer's disease, glaucoma and the microbiota, Dravet's Syndrome, schizophrenia, brain development, and chips…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 35: Neuromodulation in treatment-resistant depression
Jason and Tim review the use of an implanted chronic deep brain sensing and stimulation device to carry out biomarker-driven closed-loop therapy that resulted…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 34: Microglia vital after spinal cord injury
TWiN explains how central nervous system resident macrophages known as microglia coordinate cellular interactions during spinal cord repair in mice. Hosts…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 33: Viruses leaving the brain
TWiN describes how neurotropic viruses leave the brain via meningeal lymphatic vessels located dorsally and basally beneath the skull. Hosts: Vincent…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 32: Relearning how to move after stroke
TWiN reviews how, in a mouse stroke model, recovery of movement is associated with the remaining cortex and the striatum coordinating their activity together…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 31: HIV-1 co-receptor shapes window for memory linking
TWiN explains the observation that in mice, the HIV-1 co-receptor CCR5 closes the temporal window for linking different memories. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 30: Gut to brain spread of alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease
TWiN describes experiments demonstrating that gut injection of alpha-synuclein fibrils in mice converts endogenous alpha-synuclein to a pathologic form that…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 29: Astrocytes close the critical period
TWiN explains the finding that in the mouse visual cortex, astrocytes are key elements in the experience-dependent wiring of brain circuits. Hosts: Vincent…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 28: Oligodendrocyte performance enhancing exosomes
TWiN reveals how oligodendrocytes enhance axonal energy metabolism by transcellular delivery of a protein, SIRT2, that deacetylates mitochondrial proteins…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 27: Eyes wired to the auditory cortex
TWiN discusses the finding that rewiring retinal projections to the auditory thalamus in ferrets leads to visually responsive cells that are typical of cells…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 26: Immunological memory in the brain
TWiN reviews evidence in mice that brain neurons encode and retrieve specific immune responses. Become a patron of TWiN! Links for this episode Memory of…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 25: Thanks for listening
TWiN answers listener questions on sex in neuroscience studies, rotating memories in the brain, odorant receptors in the brain, and neutrophils that promote…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 24: Social transmission of maternal behavior with Ioana Carcea and Robert Froemke
Ioana and Robert join TWiN to discuss their work demonstrating that rodents acquire maternal behavior by social transmission from an experienced mother to a…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 23: Peripheral nervous system with Bruce Carter
Bruce Carter joins TWiN to discuss the peripheral nervous system: the development of nerves that convey sensory information like touch from the tips of your…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 22: It's never lupus
TWiN explains how anti-DNA antibodies present in lupus patients bind to GluN2A-containing NMDA receptors, act as positive allosteric modulators, and impair…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 21: How do we know if a mouse is hallucinating?
TWiN explores a study of hallucination-like perception in mice which supports the idea that hallucinations arise as faulty perceptual inferences due to…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 20: Drifting aromas in the brain
While perceptual constancy requires the brain to maintain a stable representation of sensory input, TWiN explores a study showing that odor-evoked responses in…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 19: Glia 101
On this episode, Vivianne gives a primer on glial cells, with the goal of thinking about the central nervous system holistically and appreciating the different…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 18: Autism and the gut microbiome with Mauro Costa-Mattioli
Mauro Costa-Mattioli joins TWiN to discuss how his laboratory dissects the contribution of host genetics and the microbiome in complex neurodevelopment…
- This Week in Neuroscience
TWiN 17: Worms see the light with Michael Nitabach
Michael Nitabach joins TWiN to discuss the finding that the nematode C. elegans, which do not have eyes, can discriminate between colors to guide foraging…