New research published in JNeurosci reports features of the brain in musicians with absolute, or perfect, pitch that likely enable individuals with this rare ability — shared by Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven — to precisely identify musical notes.

Attaining tenure and earning promotions are key milestones in an academic career. The process takes between five and seven years, and decisions are made based on a combination of research, teaching, and service to the academic community. For many female neuroscientists, however, achieving this goal can be a challenge. Although tenure and promotion committees strive to be objective, implicit bias — subtle discrimination based on cultural stereotypes — inadvertently enters into the decision-making process.

Week of June 10, 2019: Read the Latest Advocacy and Science News

As organizations representing a wide range of scientific, engineering, and mathematical disciplines, we will not be deterred by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race considerations in college and university admissions.

Neuroscience giving to support process, infrastructure

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) successfully competed for a $1.35 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to continue its longstanding Neuroscience Scholars Program (NSP).

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) successfully competed for a $1.35 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to continue its longstanding Neuroscience Scholars Program (NSP).

JNeurosci is excited to introduce another new feature »

The amyloid cascade hypothesis suggests that the aggregation and deposition of amyloid-β protein is an initiating event in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Using amyloid imaging technology, such as the positron emission tomography (PET) agent Pittsburgh compound-B (PiB), it is possible to explore the natural history of preclinical amyloid deposition in people at high risk for AD. With this goal in mind, asymptomatic ( n = 5) and symptomatic ( n = 5) carriers of presenilin-1 (PS1) mutations (C410Y or A426P) that lead to early-onset AD and noncarrier controls from both kindreds ( n = 2) were studied with PiB–PET imaging and compared with sporadic AD subjects ( n = 12) and controls from the general population ( n = 18). We found intense and focal PiB retention in the striatum of all 10 PS1 mutation carriers studied (ages 35–49 years). In most PS1 mutation carriers, there also were increases in PiB retention compared with controls in cortical brain areas, but these increases were not as great as those observed in spo...

Navigation by path integration requires that self-motion cues be used to keep track of the translatory and rotatory components of a journey so that one’s position with respect to a starting location may be updated accurately. We hypothesized that ideothetic information from the optic flow field alone is sufficient for navigation. Sixty-one humans actively explored with a joystick a computer generated virtual environment. Then, after removal of all local and distal visual landmarks, participants estimated their position relative to previously visited locations during either passive linear displacement or angular rotation. Participants were able to estimate their location with respect to targets in a “heads-down” journey during which the only continuous self-motion cue available was the speed of motion of the ground. Estimation errors varied significantly as a function of distance to target, the speed of movement and the number of landmarks available at the beginning of the journey. Estimation errors and the...