The hottest Neuroscience Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Science Topics

Weekly Dose of Optimism #174

Not Boring by Packy McCormick • 130 implied HN points • 19 Dec 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Science is developing organ perfusion systems that can keep organs alive outside the body for much longer, which could turn transplants into scheduled procedures, increase usable donations, and enable organ banking or swapping.
  2. Self-experiments with high-dose psilocybin showed rapid improvements in mental health, brain plasticity, metabolic control, and inflammation. These results suggest psychedelics might become part of longevity strategies for some people, though risks remain.
  3. Researchers are 3D-printing tiny helix structures that manipulate terahertz waves, unlocking a hard-to-reach part of the electromagnetic spectrum for telecom, sensing, and even polarization-encoded data. A year-end scientific review also highlights wide-ranging, high-impact advances across many fields, signaling rapid progress.

New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes

DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER • 750 implied HN points • 17 Jul 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Our eyes have different cells that help us see color, but they sometimes overlap, making it hard to see some colors clearly. This overlapping means we usually never activate only one type of color cell at a time.
  2. Some researchers are using lasers to stimulate specific color cells in our eyes, allowing people to see colors they typically wouldn't be able to experience. This can create unique visual experiences that challenge our understanding of color.
  3. Optical illusions might help us see new colors too, without lasers. However, whether these illusions can truly take us beyond what we usually see with our eyes is still an open question.

the agi dream keeps missing the point

Brain Pizza • 529 implied HN points • 16 Aug 25
🕹 Technology Neuroscience
  1. The idea that intelligence can be created just by collecting more data is a big misunderstanding. Intelligence is more about how we interact with and adapt to the world, rather than just crunching numbers.
  2. Current approaches to AGI focus too much on centralization, which ignores how intelligence naturally develops in a distributed way through social and biological processes.
  3. True understanding isn't just about having tons of information; it's about context and how we learn from our experiences. Intelligence evolves through interaction and adaptation, not through simply stacking data.
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Lit mag Guernica implodes, LLMs beat neuroscientists, CS vs. Philosophy deathmatch, AI pollution reaches science

The Intrinsic Perspective • 4805 implied HN points • 15 Mar 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. AI data pollution in science is a concerning issue, with examples of common AI stock phrases being used in scientific literature without real contribution.
  2. AI language models outperformed human neuroscientists in predicting future neuroscientific results, raising questions on the importance of understanding linguistic modifications versus actual predictions.
  3. Literary magazine Guernica faced backlash after a controversial essay led to writers withdrawing pieces, staff resigning, and social media condemnation, stressing the importance of careful reading and understanding context.

Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics

psychotechnology • 23 implied HN points • 07 Feb 26
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Cluster headaches are an extreme, recurring form of pain that can be utterly incapacitating and even drive people to desperate measures.
  2. Psychedelics—especially inhaled DMT at low doses—can abort attacks almost instantly, and psilocybin/LSD can reduce or prevent cycles, often outperforming standard acute treatments.
  3. Legal barriers and crude healthcare metrics leave many patients without access or funding, so advocacy and organized efforts are pushing for research, policy change, and expanded compassionate access.

Monday Links

Niko McCarty • 159 implied HN points • 27 May 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Scientists can now deliver single molecules into living cells using special tools called nanopipettes. This could help in studying cell functions more precisely.
  2. Neuralink is facing problems with its brain chip as most of the threads inserted in the first human are not working. They plan to implant another chip in another person soon.
  3. Greenpeace is blocking the planting of Golden Rice, which is modified to help prevent vitamin A deficiency. This decision may change as the Philippine government intends to challenge it.

Three Pounds of Asking

Neuro Athletics • 50 implied HN points • 05 Jan 26
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Neurosurgery shows how intimate, fragile, and precise the brain and skull are, where millimetres and tiny vessels can mean the difference between life and death. The skull is living tissue with active veins, and operating on it is both technical and unexpectedly ordinary.
  2. Consciousness and memory are grounded in specific brain structures, so repairing or stimulating those parts can restore a person’s sense of self and bring back vivid experiences. The brain’s wiring and geography matter for who we feel we are.
  3. Alzheimer’s research has often overlooked sex differences, and women are disproportionately affected; menopause-related metabolic changes in the brain are a crucial, under-studied factor. This gap shows how much is missed when studies assume one body represents all bodies.

Eve Theory of Consciousness (v2)

Vectors of Mind • 825 implied HN points • 10 May 23
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Women may have evolved recursion before men, based on prehistoric myths and societal structures.
  2. The downsides and challenges of recursion may have led to unique pathways for human development.
  3. Gendered differences in genetic, cognitive, and cultural factors could have influenced the evolution of self-awareness and recursion in humans.

The Computational Case for Hypocrisy

Living Fossils • 19 implied HN points • 28 Jan 26
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. The mind is a bundle of older, unconscious drives that act first, and a later "press secretary" layer that explains or justifies those actions to others.
  2. Because core drives are deeply integrated and costly to change, evolution added a lightweight adapter (like LoRA in AI) to steer outputs without rewiring the base system.
  3. Hypocrisy is thus an efficient solution: layering explanations over raw impulses preserves survival functions while enabling social norms. AI models reveal this split by showing internal impulses versus the polished outputs.

474: Apple Cloud Gaming, Elon Musk vs Tesla & OpenAI, LVMH, Dialup Era, Batteries, Chip Smuggling, Neuralink + Humans, and Malaria Vaccine

Liberty’s Highlights • 373 implied HN points • 31 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Neuroscience
  1. Reflect on past technological transitions to appreciate progress made and inspire future advancements
  2. Batteries are crucial for transitioning to clean energy but require significant investment and innovation
  3. Exciting developments in technology, from Apple allowing game streaming to Neuralink's brain implants

The One Weird Trick That Gave Humans Language

The Ruffian • 319 implied HN points • 02 Aug 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Humans have a special way of communicating that's different from other animals. Unlike apes, we have unique brain areas for language, like Broca's and Wernicke's areas, which help us produce and understand speech.
  2. Our ability to speak is not just about having a bigger brain. Instead, it includes inherited instincts like taking turns in conversations and sharing attention, which help us learn language from a young age.
  3. Language skills come from a combination of learned and instinctual behaviors. Children need social connections to develop language, just like baby birds learn to fly by trying and practicing with a supportive environment.

Analyze Brain Regions, not Neurons

John Ball inside AI • 59 implied HN points • 08 Jul 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. It's better to study brain regions rather than just neurons because brain regions are responsible for specific functions, and damage to these regions leads to predictable problems.
  2. AI development has focused too much on the workings of individual neurons instead of understanding how brain regions connect and work together as a system.
  3. Understanding meaning is crucial for AI to function like human brains, as language and thought come from the brain's ability to store and connect experiences.

Bacterial Xanax

Eat Shit and Prosper • 519 implied HN points • 19 Nov 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. The human brain has many neurotransmitters that affect how we feel, much like how different tastes shape our eating experience. Just as tasting food can change our mood, our brain's chemistry can influence our emotions.
  2. Benzodiazepines, like Xanax, were discovered to help with anxiety before scientists fully understood how they worked. They enhance the effects of a natural calming neurotransmitter called GABA, but researchers are still figuring out if our bodies have natural versions of these calming substances.
  3. Gut bacteria might play a role in anxiety by producing compounds that assist with brain function. If these helpful bacteria are reduced or absent, it could lead to anxiety disorders, suggesting that restoring these good bacteria could help some people.

A Bridging of Dimensions

ᴋʟᴀᵾs • 628 implied HN points • 15 Jun 23
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Former government officials have revealed details about UFO crash retrieval programs involving non-human intelligence and advanced materials.
  2. The use of topological materials in UFO technology could explain exotic properties, like strange isotopes and materials able to deform into higher dimensions.
  3. Connections between the human brain's multi-dimensional functions and UFO phenomena could suggest a link between consciousness and unexplained aerial phenomena.

Introducing Deep Symbolics

John Ball inside AI • 59 implied HN points • 02 Jul 24
🕹 Technology Neuroscience
  1. Deep Symbolics (DS) aims to improve upon Deep Learning (DL) by incorporating how brains work, especially in understanding and using symbols rather than just statistics. This is important for developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
  2. Unlike traditional DL systems that learn in a single training run, Deep Symbolics can continuously learn and adapt, similar to how humans pick up new knowledge and skills throughout life.
  3. Deep Symbolics focuses on creating a more brain-like model by using hierarchical and bidirectional patterns, which improves its ability to process language and resolve ambiguities better than current AI systems.

How do we heal?

Bits of Wonder • 589 implied HN points • 28 Feb 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Human suffering can be changed by addressing cultural circumstances and psychology.
  2. Therapy aims to understand and overcome toxic mental patterns for a happier and more resilient life.
  3. Memory reconsolidation is a potential breakthrough in therapy, offering enduring change in behavior.

agent.bio

LatchBio • 63 implied HN points • 09 Dec 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. An interactive sandbox hosts natural-language agents tailored to five major spatial biology platforms (Takara Seeker, Vizgen MERFISH, AtlasXOmics DBiT-seq, 10X Xenium, and 10X Visium) so scientists can run end-to-end spatial analyses.
  2. Agents operate in two modes—"proactive" for automated runs and "step-by-step" for frequent check-ins—and users should prefer step-by-step for important work because the sandboxes were built for specific datasets and may not generalize perfectly.
  3. Video demos show these agents can ingest raw outputs, run QC, clustering, differential tests, and annotate spatial features across diverse biological problems, and the roadmap focuses on benchmarks, purpose-built infrastructure, and tech-specific heuristics to make agents reliable for scientific decisions.

Sonia Gandhi's mission to change Parkinson's trials

Rory’s Always On Newsletter • 734 implied HN points • 05 Sep 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Professor Sonia Gandhi leads a mission to improve Parkinson's trials by implementing ACT PD initiative for more efficient drug testing.
  2. The UK aims to become a hub for clinical trials like the multi-arm system to find disease-modifying therapies for Parkinson's faster.
  3. Funding is crucial for scientists like Professor Gandhi to advance technology and trial designs for breakthroughs in Parkinson's research.

Experience More Epiphanies in 2024

The Recovering Academic • 376 implied HN points • 19 Dec 23
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Epiphanies can come suddenly, triggered by external stimuli and internal processing, leading to a unique pleasure and breakthrough.
  2. Creating optimal conditions for epiphanies involves changing surroundings, allowing for diversion, and being open to different experiences.
  3. Distinguishing between pseudo-insight and real epiphanies is important; genuine epiphanies offer practical solutions or profound impacts on an individual's life.

Technically Monthly (February 2026)

Technically • 14 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Neuroscience
  1. Modern generative models mirror pathways in the human brain, and many researchers believe leveraging that similarity could be key to much stronger AI.
  2. Real cloud-spend data shows the fastest-growing AI use cases are coding agents, low-latency LLM inference, and computational biology, while AI art and video generation have plateaued as the market professionalizes.
  3. Models overuse em dashes mainly because of their training data and tokenization quirks—older texts and auto-converted punctuation make the em dash common—and this highlights how dataset quality and representativeness drive model behavior.

Predictions about the future of neurogrifters and neuro-nonsense

Brain Pizza • 728 implied HN points • 26 Dec 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Neuroscience is becoming popular, but this can lead to the rise of people trying to take advantage of it for their own gain. It's important to be wary of those exploiting this trend.
  2. Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future of neuro-related claims and theories. Many ideas about neuroscience may not hold up over time.
  3. The term 'neuro-' is becoming a buzzword, which can lead to confusion and misinformation. It's vital to approach neuro-based claims with a critical eye.

Links for Winter 2026

Telescopic Turnip • 31 implied HN points • 28 Dec 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Some viruses can trigger bacteria to self-organize into a single, coordinated structure, producing collective behaviors that look a lot like a hive mind.
  2. Gene-level molecular clocks suggest mitochondria were acquired relatively late, after the nucleus, cytoskeleton, and vesicle-transport systems had already evolved, which challenges the idea that mitochondria jump-started eukaryotic complexity.
  3. Forbidding children from moving or fidgeting appears to impair creativity, and larger studies are needed before treating stillness as a universal schooling requirement.

Base case for a democratic resurgence: We're (not entirely) doomed

Brain Pizza • 595 implied HN points • 21 Jan 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Neuroscience
  1. Some countries are improving in education and civic knowledge, but it’s not equal for everyone. Wealthier and urban areas are doing better, while rural and older groups are falling behind.
  2. There is a growing gap in how well people understand important topics, which can affect society. This divide is especially seen between different age groups and urban versus rural populations.
  3. Even though there are challenges, there is still hope for democracy to improve. People are looking at different ways to make government better and more inclusive.

The dangers of Andrew Huberman

Trickle-Down Wellness • 216 implied HN points • 09 Feb 24
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Andrew Huberman has faced criticism for sharing misinformation regarding sunscreen and flu prevention.
  2. Huberman's avoidance of common health interventions like sunscreen and vaccines while promoting cold plunges and supplements is concerning.
  3. Critics have pointed out multiple inaccuracies in Huberman's claims about immunity, cold, and flu transmission, highlighting the importance of consulting credible experts.

Invisible feedback loops: How the body shapes the brain

Brain Pizza • 662 implied HN points • 27 Nov 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. The brain is not separate from the body; they work together in complex ways. Understanding how they interact can give us better insights into health and disease.
  2. Various bodily factors like gut health, muscle activity, and fat can influence how our brain functions. This shows the importance of considering the whole body when studying the brain.
  3. Topics like cancer cachexia and the gut-brain axis highlight specific connections between body signals and brain function, which can impact cognitive health.

AI and neuroscience

Technically • 21 implied HN points • 13 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Neuroscience
  1. Neural networks are deliberately inspired by the brain: they use many simple "neurons" wired together to detect patterns and process information.
  2. This brain-inspired approach has a long history and has been applied to real problems since early work by neuroscientists and engineers, showing the idea actually works in practice.
  3. The brain is still poorly understood, so AI only roughly approximates biological brains, and many researchers think learning more about the brain could be key to building far more powerful intelligence.

Stuff I found interesting in December

Samstack • 1537 implied HN points • 31 Dec 23
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Be cautious of assuming correlation implies causation, as the sign can be opposite of the true effect
  2. Income inequality in America may not have risen much since the 1960s, contrary to popular belief
  3. Anti-immigration voters often consider the issue more important than pro-immigration voters, impacting public perception

'Just put your phone away'

Brain Pizza • 1390 implied HN points • 16 Jan 24
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Smartphones are everywhere, and we're still figuring out social norms around their use.
  2. Smartphones are essential for modern life - from banking to booking flights, they're incredibly useful.
  3. Smartphones offer insights into psychology and neuroscience, allowing us to track thoughts and emotions in real-time.

Some interesting reads for February 2024

Brain Pizza • 1258 implied HN points • 20 Feb 24
🏥 Health & Wellness Neuroscience
  1. Chernobyl's mutant wolves have developed resistance to cancer, showcasing altered immune systems and genetic resilience.
  2. Long COVID can lead to cognitive impairments, such as attentional deficits and cognitive slowing, persisting over months.
  3. Horizontal leaderless organizations may struggle in enacting change effectively, necessitating a theory of change and hard work for success.

Why wasn't preservation with the goal of potential future revival started earlier in history?

Neurobiology Notes • 176 implied HN points • 16 Jan 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Despite preservation with the goal of future revival not being proposed for most of human history, in 1962, Evan Cooper and Robert Ettinger independently introduced the concept of cryonics.
  2. Factors influencing the delay in proposing preservation with future revival include a need for optimism in technological progress, willingness to take risks, and advances in preservation technology.
  3. Other possible reasons for the delayed start include societal restrictions, advancements in information theory, and the idea that preservation does not need to be perfect to be pursued.

"Cheap tricks" in human language comprehension

The Counterfactual • 119 implied HN points • 04 Mar 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. People often don’t notice mistakes in language and just assume they are reading correctly. This happens because our brains are quick to fill in the gaps and make sense of sentences, even if they are wrong.
  2. Traditionally, understanding language was thought to involve deep processing, but new ideas suggest we often use simple, fast tricks instead. This is called 'good-enough' comprehension and helps us keep up in fast conversations.
  3. Just like humans, language models also use shortcuts. While some criticize AI for not truly understanding language, humans rely on similar cognitive tricks to quickly navigate and understand communication.

New Record(ings)!

Brain Blast • 39 implied HN points • 12 Jun 24
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Intra-cranial electroencephalography (iEEG) is a technology using tiny electrodes in the brain to record signals, and Precision Neuroscience set a world record with 4,096 electrodes.
  2. Wilder Penfield pioneered important techniques in brain surgery and epilepsy treatment, including the Montreal Procedure and temporal lobectomy, affecting both surgical outcomes and scientific understanding of the brain.
  3. Stereo EEG, a variant of iEEG, allows for deep brain signal recording, and using iEEG in a Stroop task helped identify brain regions involved in attentional control processes in the prefrontal cortex.

Intrinsic Primacy: Consciousness, the Impetus of Man

Holodoxa • 259 implied HN points • 18 Jul 23
🔬 Science Neuroscience
  1. Our consciousness and internal thoughts are essential to our human experience, leading to the question of where they originate in the brain.
  2. Neuroscience faces challenges in understanding consciousness, with the field needing a new paradigm to address the relationship between brain function and conscious experience.
  3. Different perspectives, such as intrinsic introspection and extrinsic scientific observation, have evolved through history, shaping how we view the world and ourselves.

Bitcoin Tech Talk #380

jimmysong • 137 implied HN points • 22 Jan 24
🔮 Crypto Neuroscience
  1. Neuroscience data can be meaningless due to flawed methods and captured academia.
  2. Getting stuck in life traps is common, but overcoming them is crucial for growth.
  3. Balancing exploration and exploitation is key in life's decision-making process.