A 2026 systematic review argues that catatonia should be read as a limbic-cortical circuit syndrome, with motor shutdown tied to brain systems for threat, salience, motivation, and emotional regulation. Research Highlights 20 studies met criteria: the 2026 review screened 1,792 records, assessed 54 full texts, and included 20 articles: 13 observational studies and 7 case …
A 2026 Nature single-neuron study recorded 3,109 medial temporal lobe neurons from 16 neurosurgical epilepsy patients and found that human item-context memory mostly used separate item and context populations: 597 stimulus-modulated neurons, 200 context-modulated neurons, and only 50 neurons that encoded specific picture-question combinations.1 The result argues against a simple “one cell stores the whole …
A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that 26 autistic children performed similarly to 25 typically developing children on objective SPACE navigation tasks, contrary to the prediction, while autistic children rated their own navigation ability lower on the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction scale.1 Research Highlights Objective performance did not separate groups: 26 autistic children and 25 …
A 2026 mouse and cell study found that ATP11B loss pushed aged brains toward hippocampal iron accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuronal ferroptosis, and worse memory behavior than wild-type comparison mice; ATP11B overexpression then improved multiple learning and memory tests in 18-month-old mice. Research Highlights Memory signal: ATP11B-deficient mice performed worse than wild-type mice on Morris water …
A 2026 multi-cohort Alzheimer’s disease study found that MRI radiomics from the hippocampus and amygdala linked plasma pTau217 and smell identification to cognitive impairment — with more added cognitive signal than simple regional volume. The result is useful because it points to a possible bridge between blood biomarkers and brain-circuit damage, but it is still …
A 2026 resting-state fMRI study of 800 adults found intra-thalamic hypoconnectivity across schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, but schizophrenia showed far broader subcortical dysconnectivity than bipolar disorder or depression.1 The calibrated read is that these diagnoses may share a thalamic vulnerability while diverging in striatal and limbic circuitry. Research Highlights Shared thalamic deficit: In …
A 2026 ADNI study reported 85.23% accuracy for ANA-GNN, a graph neural network that combined structural MRI regional features with clinical variables to classify cognitively normal controls, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease.1 The result is useful, but the clinical-feature ablation dropped accuracy to 68.35%, so the model should be read as multimodal decision-support research, …