Repeated concussions and other sports-related brain injuries have been recently thrust into the center of public attention. This forum looks at several aspects of this issue from the science of concussions through athletes' perspectives on the competitive system that can put young athletes at risk of injury. Panelists raise questions about whether society can reconcile its insatiable appetite for competition with safety owed to those who risk being harmed by them.

Explore the key tenants, best practices, and other considerations, such as those related to funding, to learn what it means to conduct rigorous and reproducible neuroscience research.

Learn about the diverse training experiences facilitated by NIH Intramural Research Programs, including how to apply for various fellowship opportunities.

An important characteristic of living systems/organisms is that they undergo cyclical episodes of rest and activity, which in higher species has evolved into sleep and waking.

Visual information emerging from the extrafoveal locations is important for visual search, saccadic eye movement control, and spatial attention allocation. Our everyday sensory experience with visual object categories varies across different parts of the visual field which may result in location-contingent variations in visual object recognition. We used a body, animal body, and chair two-forced choice object category recognition task to investigate this possibility. Animal body and chair images with various levels of visual ambiguity were presented at the fovea and different extrafoveal locations across the vertical and horizontal meridians. We found heterogeneous body and chair category recognition across the visual field. Specifically, while the recognition performance of the body and chair presented at the fovea were similar, it varied across different extrafoveal locations. The largest difference was observed when the body and chair images were presented at the lower-left and upper-right visual fields...

Brain rhythms, produced by the synchronized electrical activity of millions of neurons, are ubiquitous throughout the mammalian brain. Rhythmic — or oscillatory — activities can be detected using direct recordings in animals and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings in humans and are seen across the brain at frequencies from less than one hertz to over 100 hertz.

Scientists do not always agree about how many different types of cells are found in the mammalian brain, nor do they understand all the variation in gene expression that exists even within well-studied categories of cells.

This past April, I proudly marched in Washington, DC, with 100,000 fellow scientists and nonscientists to show our support for the role of science in policy-making.

The brain attends to environmental rhythms by aligning the phase of internal oscillations. However, the factors underlying fluctuations in the strength of this phase entrainment remain largely unknown. In the present study we examined whether the strength of low-frequency EEG phase entrainment to rhythmic stimulus sequences varied with pupil size and posterior alpha-band power, thought to reflect arousal level and excitability of posterior cortical brain areas, respectively. We recorded pupil size and scalp EEG while participants carried out an intermodal selective attention task, in which they were instructed to attend to a rhythmic sequence of visual or auditory stimuli and ignore the other perceptual modality. As expected, intertrial phase coherence (ITC), a measure of entrainment strength, was larger for the task-relevant than for the task-irrelevant modality. Across the experiment, pupil size and posterior alpha power were strongly linked with each other. Interestingly, ITC tracked both variables: lar...

Time spent on applying for grants is on the rise, and many SfN members have also expressed uncertainty about the future of neuroscience funding in the United States. On August 10, from 12-1 pm, Michael Heintz, SfN's director of advocacy and training, will host a live chat in the Neuronline community to answer members' questions regarding the federal budget and its potential impact on NIH and NSF grants. During the live chat, Michael and his team will also answer member questions related to SfN’s advocacy efforts and the best approaches members can take for communicating with elected officials. Members are encouraged to submit their questions for Michael in advance of the live chat by posting in the live chat discussion thread in the Neuronline community.