Awake Mouse Brain Motion Was Driven by Abdominal Coupling, Not Heartbeat
A 2026 Nature Neuroscience study found that awake mouse brain motion was driven mainly by locomotion-linked abdominal muscle activity, not by respiration or cardiac rhythm; the researchers mapped displacement vectors at 134 cortical sites in 24 mice and modeled how that motion could push fluid out of brain tissue.1 The result sharpens the body-brain mechanics …