Fever is a common adverse reaction to vaccination, contributing to vaccine hesitancy and reduced uptake. To understand variation in fever risk, we longitudinally profiled fecal microbiota, oral temper...

Lab-grown organoids wire into mice missing a key part of their brain, offering a new way to test drugs for developmental conditions.

The perceptual interpretation of a static image, such as the Necker cube, can change spontaneously, resulting in endogenously driven changes in perception. We studied how different peripheral markers ...

A prominent psychologist and meditation teacher set out to research the benefits of the practice. What she found alarmed her.

Beyond sustaining life, breathing is a vital physiological rhythm that shapes cognition, perception, emotional regulation, and mental health. Breathing has a direct effect on neuronal excitability and is coupled to neural oscillations across a variety of brain regions. Notably, both respiration and neural oscillations are asymmetric and not perfectly rhythmic: for example, every breath has a different shape and duration, and is interspersed with variable pauses. Here, we examined the coupling between breathing and the brain by quantifying the nonsinusoidal features of each breath and comparing it to the shape of each corresponding neural oscillation cycle. By leveraging invasive human brain recordings from 16 participants (8 female, 8 male), we found respiration-neural waveform coupling on a breath-by-breath, cycle-by-cycle basis across limbic and cortical forebrain regions. For decades, the dominant perspective on cognition and mental health have focused on the brain, but recent work is highlighting the importance of brain-body interactions. Our results show that the coupling between breathing and neural activity is much richer than previously appreciated, and our approach opens new avenues for studying these peripheral-to-central nervous system interactions in a more robust, temporally precise manner. Significance Statement Breathing shapes brain activity, but prior work has characterized this coupling by aggregating across many breath cycles, leaving the fine-grained shape of individual breaths unexamined. Here, we show that the precise waveform shape of each breath is coupled to the shape of corresponding neural oscillation cycles in the human forebrain, on a breath-by-breath basis. Using invasive brain recordings from 16 epilepsy patients, we demonstrate that temporal and amplitude features of individual breaths are linked to the morphology of neural oscillations in limbic and cortical regions. This cycle-by-cycle respiratory-neural coupling reveals a richer and more temporally precise relationship between breathing and brain activity than previously appreciated.

Like a highway system, the vagus nerve branches profusely from your brain through your organs to marshal bodily functions, including aspects of mind such as mood, pleasure and fear.

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further.

First discovered in anesthetized animals, neural traveling waves (nTWs) have now been observed throughout the brains of awake animals, where they infl…

Embodied cognition—the idea that mental states and processes should be understood in relation to one’s bodily constitution and interactions with the world—remai...

Abstract. A generative model can be defined as a model of the latent causes of sensory input that can be used to generate new data samples. By examining em

Abstract. Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

ABSTRACT. C.H. Waddington (1905-1975) was a British biologist and perhaps the major figure in developmental biology between the 1940s and 1960s. He is one of the few pre-molecular-age developmental bi...

Myelin may serve as an energy reserve for the brain, and neuroscientists are rethinking how the brain stores, shares and protects energy.

Stress evokes a complex repertoire of psychological and physiological responses. This paper introduces the Leiden Stroop-like Stress Task (LSST), a pa…

How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

Interoceptive interventions offer a promising avenue for improving mental health conditions, which commonly feature bodily or interoceptive symptoms. …

As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences – as well as their predict…

Based on these results, no firm conclusions can be drawn regarding the utility of HEP amplitude as a clinical biomarker. Substantial heterogeneity and widespread methodological inconsistencies across ...