OsciPod

A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University built a single glass micropipette device that spontaneously fires neuron-like electrical spikes using only ion flow and surface chemistry — no transistors required. The device us... more

How does the brain switch between the synchronized rhythms of sleep and the scattered activity of waking? Kuroki and Mizuseki introduce the EI-Kuramoto model, which divides neural oscillators into excitatory (attractive) and inhibitory (repulsive) po... more

How does the brain stay stable through aging, learning, and injury? This episode explores a computational model showing that inhibitory synaptic plasticity — a self-adjusting rule that strengthens local braking whenever excitation runs too high — can... more

Why do mice—and likely all mammals—consistently make the same perceptual mistakes on certain sounds? Researchers at the University of Mainz used large-scale two-photon calcium imaging in the mouse auditory cortex to map how hundreds of neurons respon... more

When we share personal memories with others, do listeners pick up on the richness of those memories — and does it change how they feel about us? A new study published in PNAS tested this across two experiments in Canada and Italy, showing that people... more

The brain's visual cortex generates gamma-band oscillations — rhythms between 30 and 80 Hz — but whether these oscillations actually help us perceive objects has been hotly debated. Karimian and colleagues argue that the stimulus-dependence of gamma ... more

This episode explores how mice trained to discriminate pulsed sounds showed shared, systematic choice biases even when sounds had the same reinforced pulse count. Seiler and colleagues found that auditory cortex population activity represented four m... more

This study is the first in the world to reveal that theta waves in the human hippocampus are "traveling waves" that move in a specific direction. Using electrode data implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients, the research team discovered that the... more