A 2026 hospital MRI study found that the left paracingulate sulcus was present in 31 of 109 catatonia patients (28%) vs. 171 of 323 psychiatric controls without catatonia (53%), a left-hemisphere group effect that survived adjustment for age, sex, scanner, brain volume, benzodiazepines, and antipsychotics.1 Research Highlights Left PCS signal: left paracingulate sulcus (PCS) presence …
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 fMRI study of 84 medication-free adolescents found that reward uncertainty had its own phase-specific brain pattern: anxiety, depression, and anhedonia separated across different task phases and brain systems.1 The clearest clinical split was narrow but useful: anxiety tracked blunted striatum/thalamus activation during uncertain non-reward expectancy, while depression and anhedonia tracked higher visual/default-network activation …
A 2026 BETA analysis of 199 older adults found that resting-state fMRI could separate 4 anxiety-related tDCS response patterns, but the result was narrower than “brain scan predicts treatment”: only the Robust tDCS Responder subtype showed a statistically reliable Active vs. Sham anxiety advantage across all participants.1 Research Highlights Only 1 subtype cleared the Active …
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 …
A 2026 eLife computational study modeled classical psychedelics by increasing a network state variable from alpha = 0 to alpha = 1, shifting perception from bottom-up sensory inference toward top-down generative replay. The result is a useful but still unproven oneirogen model: hallucinations look less like random noise and more like wake-time replay of a …
A 2026 eNeuro analysis of 163 people ages 3.5–24.7 found that wake EEG amplitude behaved like a sleep-pressure marker, but wake alpha-density changed in opposite directions across development: it decreased overnight in children and increased overnight in adolescents and adults.1 Research Highlights Alpha density flipped by age: In 163 participants ages 3.5–24.7, oscillation density showed …