Brain stimulation

Believe it or not, male sexual desire actually begins in the brain. Scientists have found the neural circuit that triggers mating behaviors and the ensuing pleasure and reward feedback in mice. They hope it can lead to new drugs to treat dysfunction.

An organic electrode that doesn’t require invasive surgery to implant and is resorbed by the body over time may be a novel way of using electrical stimulation to treat non-chronic conditions such as cancer, nerve injuries and pain.

Stanford scientists have found a biological mechanism behind severe depression, and treated it. Signals between two brain regions flow the wrong way in people with depression, but magnetic stimulation reverses them, drastically improving symptoms.

A new design for a deep brain stimulation implant could greatly improve the experience of living with these devices, by using integrated triboelectric generators to convert a user’s breathing movements into electricity.

Scientists have demonstrated that clusters of brain cells in a lab dish can be taught to play Pong in an approximation of sentience. This is the first time that these cells have performed goal-directed tasks, opening the door for better brain models.

It’s unsurprising but unfortunate that as we get older, our capacity to learn new skills diminishes. A new study by researchers at EPFL has found that non-invasive electrical brain stimulation can help older adults learn new motor skills much faster.

Researchers at Rice University have shown how they can hack the brains of fruit flies to make them remote controlled. The flies performed a specific action within a second of a command being sent to certain neurons in their brain.

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) often experience involuntary movements, which disrupt their ability to perform many tasks. A new device could help reduce those movements, by buzzing its wearer in the wrist.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have identified a specific set of neurons in the brainstem that, when stimulated by electric pulses, can help improve the mobility of patients with Parkinson’s disease.

A fascinating new study explores how it ultrasound could one day be used to tackle psychiatric disorders, by modulating the way the brains of monkeys connect rewards and outcomes with specific events or choices.

An incredible proof-of-concept study has demonstrated how a brain implant can treat severe depression using electrical stimulation. The implant tracks neural activity for patterns of depression and zaps a key region in real-time to disrupt the cycle.

New research is shedding light on how specifically targeted pulses of magnetic stimulation to the brain can improve episodic memory. The work found inhibiting activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances memory formation.