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.

This study maps the single-axon projections of 7,180 hypothalamic peptidergic neurons in male mice and uncovers extensive collateralization, topographic target innervation and modular intra-hypothalamic organization.

Zhang et al. identify unimodal neural representations in the spinal cord of cutaneous mechanical and heat stimuli gated by a shared feed-forward local inhibitory neuron type and a neural transition during neuropathy, with increased excitatory drive.

The temporal order of events in working memory is thought to be reflected by ordered neuronal firing at different phases. Here the authors show that this is not the case and that phase order is linked to stimulus timing and oscillation frequency.

Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTSP induction follows patterned dynamics, is higher in new contexts and lower in CA3 than CA1.

The authors show that behavior and dopamine responses track prospective, but not retrospective, contingency. These results are explained by temporal difference (TD) learning models, indicating that TD errors are a measure of contingency.

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.

The nervous system can drive the initiation, growth, spread, and therapy resistance of cancer, and cancer can manipulate the nervous system in ways that further support disease progression. Tumors growing within the brain or elsewhere in the body connect with neuronal networks in circuit-specific manners, via neuron-to-cancer synaptic interactions and paracrine crosstalk. Moreover, neural factors govern critical components of the tumor environment, such as the immune system, and cancer can use neural mechanisms in a malignant cell-intrinsic manner. Here we provide a personal view on the burgeoning field of cancer neuroscience and highlight the need to approach cancer research from a neuroscience perspective — together with neuroscientists.

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.