The authors show that brain inflammation in COVID-19 correlates with viral load, systemic inflammation and virus-sensing pattern recognition receptors. Microglial dysfunction occurs at sites of vascular inflammation with myelin injury and synapse loss.

A model of compositional state spaces in the hippocampus shows latent learning and rapid generalization. Bakermans et al. show that this model predicts the emergence of place responses in replay.

During foraging with threat–reward conflicts in mice, dopamine modulates two competing neuron types in the striatum for flexible threat coping, from initial threat avoidance to eventual overcoming of the threat.

The link between neuroinflammation and the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) is unclear. Here, the authors show that in MS lesions, neuronal somatic mutations accumulate 2.5 times faster than in controls, equivalent to 1,291 excess mutations by age 70, suggesting that neuroinflammation can be mutagenic.

Targeting the endothelium across ages and neurodegenerative diseases in 92 donors with single-cell inCITE-seq reveals similar alterations in ~40% of capillaries in AD, ALS and FTD. Endothelial TDP-43 loss coincides with increased nuclear p65/NF-κB activity and reduced Wnt/β-catenin.

Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of downstream decision making.

This postmortem study identifies brain-first and two body-first subtypes in prediagnostic cases of Lewy body disease. It highlights sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways in body-first disease, advancing insights on disease onset and progression.

Cholinergic interneurons act at nicotinic receptors to depress dopamine release, interrupting its relationship to dopamine neuron firing and supporting an inverse scaling of dopamine release according to cholinergic activity.

The scientific study of consciousness was sanctioned as an orthodox field of study only three decades ago. Since then, a variety of prominent theories have flourished, including integrated information theory, which has been recently accused of being pseudoscience by more than 100 academics. Here we critically assess this charge and offer thoughts to elevate the clash into positive lessons for our field.

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness, which is subjective, and accounts for its presence and quality in objective, testable terms. Attempts to label as ‘pseudoscientific’ a theory distinguished by decades of conceptual, mathematical, and empirical developments expose a crisis in the dominant computational-functionalist paradigm, which is challenged by IIT’s consciousness-first paradigm.