Learning What Substance Is Suspected of Causing Alzheimer’s May Throw You Into an Existential Crisis

The Terrorist in the Brain

What can Robin Williams and Bruce Willis teach us about dementia? This article explores the complex biological realities of brain diseases, controversies in Alzheimer's research, the risks of new drugs, and the multi-billion-dollar industry exploiting our fear of cognitive decline.

Can Alzheimer’s really be reversed, as a new documentary claims?

A CNN documentary follows two people with Alzheimer’s who took part in a study to determine if lifestyle changes can reverse symptoms.

The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints

Your Brain on MIT Media Lab

AI overuse could spark "brain fry," new research finds

The mental strain associated with AI carries "significant costs," researchers find.

Single-cell multiregion dissection of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause of dementia worldwide, but the cellular pathways that underlie its pathological progression across brain regions remain poorly understood1–3. Here we report a single-cell transcriptomic atlas of six different brain regions in the aged human brain, covering 1.3 million cells from 283 post-mortem human brain samples across 48 individuals with and without Alzheimer’s disease. We identify 76 cell types, including region-specific subtypes of astrocytes and excitatory neurons and an inhibitory interneuron population unique to the thalamus and distinct from canonical inhibitory subclasses. We identify vulnerable populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons that are depleted in specific brain regions in Alzheimer’s disease, and provide evidence that the Reelin signalling pathway is involved in modulating the vulnerability of these neurons. We develop a scalable method for discovering gene modules, which we use to identify cell-type-specific and region-specific modules that are altered in Alzheimer’s disease and to annotate transcriptomic differences associated with diverse pathological variables. We identify an astrocyte program that is associated with cognitive resilience to Alzheimer’s disease pathology, tying choline metabolism and polyamine biosynthesis in astrocytes to preserved cognitive function late in life. Together, our study develops a regional atlas of the ageing human brain and provides insights into cellular vulnerability, response and resilience to Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

Depression doesn't shrink the brain like we thought it did | New Scientist

For the past decade, depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, which has a vital role in memory. But a large study using up-to-date scanning techniques suggests this may not be the case

Individual Experience vs. The Cochrane Review

On my decade-long exploration seeking a scientific language for singular evidence.

AI Use Appears to Have a "Boiling Frog" Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

A new study claims to offer the first causal link between AI dependency and cognitive erosion. Researchers warn of long-term implications.

Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?

A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multiple causes, while...

UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage

A new study by UCLA Health has discovered what researchers say is the first drug to fully reproduce the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in model mice.

The strain in your brain

Do you feel it?

Chronic methylphenidate abuse: Effects on behaviour, redox homeostasis, and cholinergic system

Methylphenidate (MPH) (metil 2-fenil-2-(piperidin-2-il) acetato) is used as a drug of abuse as well as a cognitive enhancer owing to its amphetaminic structure. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether chronic exposure to an abusive context and dose of MPH (80 mg/L for 15 min/day for 7 days) in adult life causes behavioural changes related to anxiety, fear, sociability, locomotion, and memory as well as altered levels of biochemical markers, cortisol, and the cholinergic system. Here we used the zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a translatio Nnal model. We showed that fish exposed to MPH showed marked hypolocomotion and anxiogenic patterns, fear behaviour, and memory delay. MPH exposure also increased the levels of antioxidant enzymes, non-protein thiols, and reactive oxygen species compared with those in the control group, and the redox status was altered at the cerebral and peripheral levels. The cholinergic system exhibits a reduction in signalling and an increase in cortisol levels. Our results clarified the mechanisms involved in the toxicity elicited by the abusive use of MPH. Overall, our results demonstrated that chronic administration of an abusive dose of MPH in individuals without a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can cause important damage.

Scientists reveal foods to eat now to stave off cognitive decline later

Data on over 3,000 people shows only 8 percent with low-quality diets maintained high cognitive abilities into their 70s, a new study reveals.

Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks | Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

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