Systems Neuroscience

Picower Institute scientists seek to understand the complex circuits and processes that the brain constructs and employs so that we can perceive, learn, think, plan, and feel. To learn more about these or other areas of inquiry, select them under Research Topics and you'll find relevant Picower people, discoveries and events.

September 22, 2025

Research Findngs

As an object moves across your field of view, the brain seamlessly hands off visual processing from one hemisphere to the other like cell phone towers or relay racers do, a new MIT study shows.

July 22, 2025

Research Findings

MIT researchers employed a novel application of tools and analysis to show that astrocytes ensure neural information processing by maintaining ambient levels of the neurotransmitter chemical GABA.

July 1, 2025

Research Findings

A first-of-its-kind study in mice reveals that neurons add and shed synapses at a frenzied pace during development to integrate visual signals from the two eyes.

June 16, 2025

Research Feature

Rooted in fundamental curiosity about how the brain works, Picower scientists continue to break new ground in understanding autism and devising treatment strategies

May 12, 2025

Research Findings

Why does the brain split visual spatial perception between its hemispheres? A new review examines the advantages and trade-offs, and how the brain ultimately makes vision feel seamless.

April 28, 2025

Research Findings

Study shows how a dopamine circuit between two brain regions enables mice to extinguish fear after a peril has passed.

April 22, 2025

Picower People

Assistant Professor Linlin Fan will apply her lab’s precise “all-optical” techniques to study how serotonin might influence plasticity in memory, and whether psychedelics affect that.

April 8, 2025

Research Findings

Upon infection, the C. elegans worm reshuffles the roles of brain cells and flips the functions of some of the chemicals it uses to regulate behavior.

April 7, 2025

Research Findings

New research on a cytokine called IL-17 adds to growing evidence that immune molecules can influence behavior during illness.

December 20, 2024

Research Feature

On a biological foundation of ions and proteins, the brain forms, stores, and retrieves memories to inform intelligent behavior

December 10, 2024

Research Findings

Place cells are well known to encode individual locations, but new experiments and analysis indicate that stitching together a “cognitive map” of a whole environment requires a broader ensemble of cells, aided by sleep, to build a richer network over seve

November 21, 2024

Recent Events

At a symposium of the Simons Center for the Social Brain, six speakers described a diversity of recently launched studies aimed at improving understanding of the autistic brain.

How the brain splits up vision without you even noticing

Study finds key role for non-neural brain cells in processing vision

Connect or reject: Extensive rewiring builds binocular vision in the brain

Autism advances

The how and why of the brain’s division across hemispheres

Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

With Searle Scholar award, Fan will study serotonin role in memory

A simple animal’s response to sickness highlights the nervous system’s surprising degrees of flexibility

Molecules that fight infection also act on the brain, inducing anxiety or sociability

From Molecules to Memory

Study suggests how the brain, with sleep, learns meaningful maps of spaces

New autism research projects represent a broad range of approaches to achieving a shared goal