Auditory targeted memory reactivation during a 2-hour nap did not improve motor retention in 20 Parkinson’s disease patients or 20 healthy older adults, even though the same cues changed sleep physiology by reducing spindle density and increasing slow-wave density.1 Research Highlights First Parkinson’s TMR test: Micca et al. studied 20 Parkinson’s disease patients and 20 …
A 2026 eLife study recorded 3,881 lateral orbitofrontal cortex units in rats and found that prior cocaine use made the OFC over-distinguish task positions that controls treated as functionally equivalent. The headline result was not gross task failure: cocaine-experienced rats still performed the odor task, but their OFC ensembles showed higher S1-vs.-S2 decoding than sucrose …
A 2026 Nature mouse study found that basolateral amygdala astrocyte Ca2+ signals tracked fear retrieval and extinction, then showed causality: 3 mg/kg CNO manipulations of astrocyte DREADDs pushed early-extinction freezing in opposite directions while both disrupting later extinction retrieval.1 Research Highlights Astrocytes tracked fear state: after 3 tone-shock pairings and 2 days of 25 cue-only …
Standard memory testing can tell a multiple-sclerosis (MS) patient that recall is normal after 30 minutes while missing a deficit that appears days later. Jansen et al. tested that exact blind spot in 62 MS patients and 65 matched controls: 7-day/30-minute recall ratios were lower in MS on both verbal-list recall (0.64 vs. 0.78, p …
A 2026 fMRI study of 79 women with interpersonal-violence-related PTSD found that the hippocampus does encode the meaning of autobiographical trauma narratives, t(140) = 4.05, p < 0.001, even though average hippocampal encoding did not rise for trauma vs. neutral memories. Research Highlights Hippocampal semantic encoding was significant: Cisler et al. analyzed 3,928 narrative sentences …
A 2026 EEG study of 106 Army National Guard recruits found that higher negative emotionality predicted poorer Go/No-Go discrimination (β = −.234, 95% CI −.392 to −.076) and lower frontal midline theta (β = −.149, 95% CI −.290 to −.001). The key result was not a vague personality-brain link: frontal midline theta, not occipital alpha, …
A 2026 multimodal MRI analysis of 509 healthy adults found that fear acquisition, extinction learning, and renewal were not predicted by one generic “fear circuit” score: functional connectivity predicted acquisition, structural connectivity predicted extinction, and effective connectivity was the only renewal signal.1 The extinction result is the clinically interesting piece because exposure therapy depends on …