Category Archives: Developmental Neuroscience

July 26

A Neuroscience Perspective on the Lifelong Consequences of Detaining Kids at the Border

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[En español] If you’ve been even partially tuned in to the news over the last few months, you’ve heard about the gut-wrenching separation of children from their parents at the United States border and the detainment centers where these children have been held. You may have seen pictures of young kids in cages, been watching when […]

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May 03

The Neurogenesis Saga: Are new neurons born in the adult human brain?

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One of neuroscience’s most heated debates during the past 50 years has been whether or not new neurons are born (a process called neurogenesis) in the adult mammalian brain. Before the late 1990s, we believed that we were born with all the neurons we would have throughout our lives. However, evidence of adult neurogenesis from […]

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November 30

CRISPR and the Real World

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” So begins our country’s Declaration of Independence. While we have learned that this preamble is all too simple in the context of wider society, consider the most basic interpretation of this sentiment; at the precise moment of a child’s birth, broader circumstances […]

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July 20

Genomes, Circuits, and the Roundworm: C. Elegans as a Model Organism

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A nematode can do much to help our understanding of human biology.

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June 23

Brain origami

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[En español] Origami (from Japanese words “ori” meaning to fold and “kami” meaning paper) is the art of paper folding. A brain and a sheet of office paper don’t seem to have much in common, but when you crumple up the sheet into a paper ball you are holding the key to one of the mysteries […]

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April 28

Zika and the Brain

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[En español] If you have been able to capture a glimpse of any news OTHER than the ongoing disaster which is the American 2016 Presidential Election, you may have caught wind of another wave of (more global) disaster: newly uncovered effects of the Zika virus. Zika first came into the spotlight when it was linked […]

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April 21

Peas or carrots: Evidence-based education programs targeting stress and attention

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I’m always keen to hear how scientists are able to reach out to their communities, whether it is by talking to young students about research opportunities, by tutoring or teaching, or by taking steps outside the lab to make direct links between research and the community. At this year’s meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), one of […]

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February 13

Oxytocin, bonding, and breastfeeding

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Valentine’s Day is a time for expressing love, and while its title may initially conjure up socially normative images of candle-lit dinners, long-stemmed roses, and canoodling with a romantic partner, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the kind of love that prevents our species from dying out: that of a mother and […]

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November 18

Antidepressants, plasticity, and language development

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As an attendee at the 5th annual Society for Neurobiology (SNL) conference, four years had passed since my first exposure to the meeting–a discussion of the state-of-the-art research being done on the neuroscience of language processing. In those four years, things have happened! This meeting left me marveling at new advances and the number of […]

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October 03

Brains in a Dish

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As a reader of the NeuWrite San Diego blog, you know the brain is exceedingly complex and incredibly interesting. What you may not have thought about is how it gets to be that way. One of the biggest mysteries of the brain is how it forms all the right connections to produce a functioning human […]

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