hit counter

Psychopathy, Empathy, and Cortical Structure in 804 Incarcerated Men

Psychopathy is not a simple “low empathy equals abnormal brain scan” story. In 804 incarcerated men, psychopathy factors tracked empathic concern, perspective taking, cortical thickness, surface area, and cortical organization—but self-reported empathy scores did not map cleanly onto cortical structure.1 Research Highlights The sample was unusually large for forensic MRI. Radecki et al. analyzed 804 …

Read more

Late Chronotype MRI Signal Vanishes After Strict Correction

Stylized illustration of an early-morning sky and a late-night sky meeting over a brain in profile, representing the structural neuroimaging question about chronotype in healthy young adults.

Popular coverage of chronotype neuroimaging usually claims that late chronotypes (evening types, often called “night owls”) show smaller cortical regions and faster brain aging than early chronotypes (morning types). A 2026 multimodal structural MRI analysis from Beheshti and Elkana ran the comparison in 136 healthy young adults using strict whole-brain correction, and the group differences …

Read more

Drug Addiction Linked to Cortical Thinning in 65 of 68 Brain Regions

Photoreal illustration of a human brain with cortical regions highlighted across substance categories, representing the cross-substance morphometric pattern in addiction.

Whether alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and cannabis damage the same brain regions or different brain regions has been hard to settle in the addiction-imaging literature. A 2026 ENIGMA Addiction analysis by Georgiadis et al. — pooling 4,733 brains across 51 sites — now has an answer. Research Highlights Across 2,782 people with substance use disorder (SUD) …

Read more

Alcohol & Brain Volume in Older Adults: Cortical Thinning & White Matter Loss in Heavy Drinkers (250g/Week) (2023 Study)

Alcohol’s effects on the brain, especially among the elderly, have long been a subject of scientific inquiry. A recent study from Gothenburg, Sweden, provides new insights into how varying levels of alcohol consumption impact brain structure in individuals aged 70 and over. This research sheds light on the relationship between alcohol intake and the aging …

Read more