Behavior News

September 3, 2026

Top Headlines

Mindfulness May Lower Blood Pressure in Just 8 Weeks

Sep. 1, 2026 Mindfulness, gratitude, and optimism training may improve blood pressure, inflammation, and other heart-health measures within just eight to 12 weeks. The strongest programs paired daily practice with regular reinforcement, suggesting that improving ...

Scientists Find a Human-only Gene That May Help Explain Our Brainpower

Aug. 31, 2026 Scientists discovered that human microglia, immune cells that help shape developing brain circuits, can take four to eight years to mature instead of just weeks as they do in mice. The unusually slow process may help explain how the human brain ...

A Major Alzheimer’s Risk Gene May Shrink Brain Cells Years Before Symptoms

Aug. 23, 2026 Researchers have uncovered a possible reason why the Alzheimer’s risk gene APOE4 can disrupt the brain long before memory problems begin. In mice, APOE4 increased a protein called Nell2, shrinking ...

Multilingual People May Have Brains Up to 13 Years Younger

Aug. 22, 2026 People who speak several languages may have brains that age more slowly, with four-language speakers showing brains that appeared about 13 years younger than those of monolinguals. Starting earlier and becoming highly fluent were also linked to a ...

Scientists Tracked Kids for 8 Years — The Screen Time Result Was Unexpected

Aug. 17, 2026 An eight-year Finnish study found that children who spent more time on screens tended to show better cognitive processing as teenagers, challenging common assumptions about screen use. Researchers ...

Immune Cells Flood Into the Aging Brain, Stanford Scientists Discover

Aug. 14, 2026 Scientists have discovered that the aging human brain may be far less isolated from the rest of the body than once believed. Stanford researchers found that large numbers of immune cells from the blood begin entering the brain as early as middle ...

Ozempic May Have Revealed the Brain’s Hidden “Craving Center”

Aug. 12, 2026 Ozempic-like drugs appear to weaken more than hunger—they may also reduce cravings for alcohol and other addictive substances. Scientists are increasingly tracing this effect to the lateral septum, a brain region that helps connect memories and ...

Scientists Discover a Hidden Brain Rhythm That Could Improve Parkinson’s Treatment

Aug. 12, 2026 Scientists have pinpointed a brain network—and its distinctive electrical rhythm—that appears to drive the benefits of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. The discovery could lead ...

The Adult Brain Can Repair Itself Better Than Scientists Thought

Aug. 12, 2026 The adult brain may be far better at repairing itself than scientists once believed. In mice, researchers discovered a special group of support cells called astrocytes that respond to damaged brain tissue by rebuilding lost cellular networks. Rather ...

Scientists Say Just 7 Days of Meditation Can Rewire Your Brain

Aug. 8, 2026 An intensive seven-day meditation retreat triggered striking changes across the brain and body, including shifts tied to neuroplasticity, immunity, metabolism, and natural pain relief. Participants also showed brain connectivity patterns resembling ...

New Autism Therapy Shows Surprising Benefits Even in Adult Mice

Aug. 7, 2026 Blocking the glycine transporter SLC6A20 restored important brain signaling and improved social, communication, and repetitive behaviors in autism-related mouse models. The treatment also worked in human brain organoids and showed lasting effects in ...

Scientists Discover a Hidden Brain Shift That Begins Around Age 50

Aug. 6, 2026 Beginning around age 50, the brain’s memory center appears to lose many of its longtime immune cells and replace them with more inflammatory ones. This surprising shift may help explain how normal aging sets the stage for Alzheimer’s disease and ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:06am EDT

Scientists Challenge a 70-Year-Old “lizard Brain” Myth

Aug. 31, 2026 A long-standing picture of brain evolution as newer, rational layers stacked on top of an ancient “lizard brain” may be deeply misleading. Researchers found that evolution instead appears to ...

Your Brain May Not Actually “make” Decisions

Aug. 25, 2026 A neuroscientist is challenging the idea that the brain contains a central system that actually “makes” our decisions. What we experience as choosing may instead emerge from the continuous ...

Researchers Reveal Deeper Workings of Brain’s Information Hub

Aug. 19, 2026 The brain has a remarkably flexible system for handling uncertainty and changing situations. Researchers found that the frontoparietal cortex constantly shifts how it communicates with other brain ...

Mysterious Waves Sweeping Across Your Brain May Help Turn Sensory Chaos Into What You See

Aug. 18, 2026 Traveling electrical waves sweeping across the brain may help determine what we notice, predict what comes next, and construct our internal picture ...

MIT Neuroscientists Discover the Brain Can Reason Without Words

Aug. 11, 2026 MIT neuroscientists have found striking evidence that language and logical reasoning are powered by separate systems in the brain. Even people with severe language impairments caused by stroke were ...

Scientists May Have Found Aging’s Hidden Trigger for Brain Disease

Aug. 3, 2026 Scientists have identified a molecular switch that may help explain why aging makes the brain more vulnerable to diseases such as ALS and Huntington’s. In worms, the protein EPS8 builds up with age ...

AI Can Tell If Your Brain Is Aging Faster Than You Are

July 31, 2026 A person’s sleeping brain may reveal warning signs of dementia long before memory problems begin. Researchers used machine learning to analyze EEG recordings from about 7,000 adults and found that ...

What If the Brain Does Not Create Consciousness?

July 30, 2026 Christof Koch is taking on one of science’s deepest mysteries: how the brain creates conscious experience, or whether it creates it at all. He argues that materialism has yet to solve this “hard ...

Your Gut May Help Your Brain Decide What to Remember

July 29, 2026 Signals traveling from the gut to the brain may help turn meals into lasting memories. Rats showed stronger memory activity after consuming nutritious foods, but not after drinking sweet liquids with ...

After 60 Years, Scientists Uncover Metformin’s Hidden Brain Effects

July 25, 2026 A decades-old diabetes drug just got a surprising twist. Scientists have discovered that metformin doesn’t just work in the liver and gut—it also acts directly in the brain, where it taps into a ...

A Single Dose Reversed Autism-Like Symptoms in Adult Mice Within Hours

July 25, 2026 Even mild inflammation during pregnancy led mouse offspring to develop persistent brain overactivity, sensory sensitivity, repetitive behaviors, and increased seizure risk. Remarkably, one dose of ...

Scientists Discover the Hidden Brain Switch That Assigns Bees Their Jobs

July 22, 2026 Researchers found that specific brain circuits help decide which jobs bees perform as they age. When those circuits were switched off, older worker bees began caring for the queen again instead of ...

Watching Too Much TV in Midlife May Shrink the Brain

July 21, 2026 Watching television very often in midlife may be linked to troubling brain changes decades later. In a study of about 1,700 adults, frequent TV viewers later showed smaller brain regions involved in ...

Alzheimer’s Breakthrough: Scientists Restore Two Hours of Sleep Without Clearing Brain Plaques

July 20, 2026 Researchers have uncovered a surprising culprit behind sleep loss in Alzheimer’s disease: the brain’s own immune cells. In mice with amyloid plaques, overactive microglia triggered inflammation ...

Millions Take Omega-3 Fish Oil for Brain Health but a New Study Found No Benefit

June 29, 2026 Fish oil supplements successfully delivered omega-3s to the brain, but a two-year study found no meaningful benefits for memory, cognition, or Alzheimer’s-related brain changes. The results ...

The Universe May Be Hiding Conscious Minds Stranger Than We Can Imagine

June 24, 2026 What if consciousness isn’t limited to brains like ours? Philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober argue that consciousness could arise in many different forms of life, even in beings built ...

Your Brain Can Keep Improving Into Your 90s, Study Finds

June 13, 2026 A three-year study of nearly 4,000 adults ranging from age 19 to 94 found that brain health can improve at any age, challenging the common belief that mental sharpness must decline as we get older. ...

Scientists Mapped Every Neural Connection in a Fruit Fly and Found a Surprise

June 10, 2026 A groundbreaking new connectome maps every neural connection in an adult fruit fly’s central nervous system, creating an unprecedented view of how the brain and body work together. The findings ...

Scientists Discover How the Brain Rewires Itself to Truly Multitask

July 12, 2026 Practice may do more than make perfect. Researchers found that extensive training physically reorganizes the brain, allowing learned tasks to bypass the prefrontal cortex and run through specialized ...

Scientists Stunned as Bumble Bees Solve a Classic Intelligence Test

July 2, 2026 Bumble bees astonished researchers by inventing a new way to reach a hidden reward, despite never being taught the trick. The discovery adds to growing evidence that these tiny insects are far ...

Your Brain Starts Making Social Decisions Before You Do

June 2, 2026 Researchers found that social behavior begins in the brain before it becomes visible as movement. In zebrafish, a coordinated pattern of activity spread across the brain several seconds before the ...

Brain Scans Reveal Two Distinct Types of Autism

June 3, 2026 Scientists have uncovered evidence that autism may include at least two biologically distinct subtypes, each marked by a different pattern of brain communication. By combining brain scans from nearly ...

New Brain Study Reveals Speech Learning Works Differently Than We Thought

June 23, 2026 A new study suggests that learning and remembering speech relies more on how the brain processes sounds and sensations than on the areas that control mouth and face movements. The discovery could ...

Scientists Discover Hidden Gut-Brain Circuit That Triggers Protein Cravings

May 28, 2026 When the body runs low on protein, the gut sends powerful signals to the brain that reshape cravings and push animals to seek essential amino acids instead of sugar. Researchers say this newly ...

Scientists Discover Why Ozempic and Wegovy Weight Loss Eventually Plateaus

May 25, 2026 New NIH research reveals that semaglutide sparks different responses inside appetite-controlling brain cells, offering fresh insight into why GLP-1 weight-loss drugs don’t work the same for ...

Scientists Discover Why Alzheimer’s Risk Hits Women So Much Harder

May 20, 2026 Women may be especially sensitive to the effects of common dementia risk factors, according to a new UC San Diego study of over 17,000 adults. Researchers say tailoring prevention strategies ...

Scientists Think They’ve Cracked the Mystery of Human Right-Handedness

May 18, 2026 A new study suggests humans became overwhelmingly right-handed because of two major evolutionary shifts: walking on two legs and developing much larger brains. Researchers found that as human ...

Brain Activity Under Anesthesia Challenges What We Know About Consciousness

June 28, 2026 The unconscious brain appears to be far more capable than scientists once believed. Researchers found that patients under general anesthesia could still process language at a sophisticated level, ...

The Real Cause of a Common Stroke May Have Been Missed for Decades

July 3, 2026 Scientists have discovered that a common type of stroke may have a very different cause than doctors once thought. Instead of fatty plaque clogging arteries, the strongest link was found with ...

Magic Mushrooms May Reshape the Brain Long After the Trip Ends

July 22, 2026 A single dose of psilocybin produced measurable changes in brain activity and possible changes in brain structure that lasted for up to a month. Participants who experienced the greatest increase in ...