Picture every synapse in your brain as a phone line. About 70% of them are live, carrying signals right now. But according to research from MIT, the remaining 30% are installed, wired, and ready to ...

Scientists have uncovered how a protein helps build and maintain vital brain connections, providing insights into the neurological problems experienced by people with a rare form of muscular dystrophy ...

MIT neuroscientists have uncovered a surprising secret hidden in the adult brain: millions of “silent synapses,” dormant connections that lie in wait until new learning calls them into action. Once ...

Co-written with Jai Liester. Silent synapses represent one of neuroscience's most fascinating discoveries—connections between neurons that lie dormant until activated by specific triggers. These ...

A multi-disciplinary team has found that depriving lab mice of sleep can lead to a reduction in synapse diversity in the brain. In their study, published on the open-access site Current Biology, the ...

Scientists have discovered that the adolescent brain does more than prune old connections. During the teen years, it actively builds dense new clusters of synapses in specific parts of neurons. These ...

New research from Oregon Health & Science University for the first time reveals the function of a little-understood junction between cells in the brain that could have important treatment implications ...

A team of physicists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Sogang University in South Korea have built an artificial synapse, the biological foundation of the human brain's ability to think ...

How do we remember the distant past? For decades, scientists have believed synaptic potentiation - the adaptive strengthening of our brain’s cellular connections - to be the key to memory retention.

Every second you are awake, billions of synapses in your brain fire signals that let you think, move, and remember. But according to research from MIT, a surprisingly large share of those synapses are ...