Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This 2002 PNAS review by Marcus Raichle and Debra Gusnard examines how the brain uses energy. The authors say the brain uses a large share of the body's energy and that most of that energy goes to ongoing, background neural activity. They note that short-lived, task-related increases in energy use…
Researchers are studying whether brain scans taken before treatment can help pick the best treatment for people with major depression. They found that activity in one brain area (the fronto-insular cortex) at rest might tell who will do better with talk therapy versus medication, while high activity in another area…
Researchers compared whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity in 21 people with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), 18 people with panic disorder (PD), and 22 matched healthy controls. They used a new measure called scaled correlation to look for differences across the brain. GAD showed stronger connections between the hippocampus/parahippocampus and the fusiform…
This paper outlines the structure and function of the "positive valence system," a set of brain and body processes that create positive or rewarding responses. It explains how an ascending arousal system senses bodily changes, activates motivational states, and links those states with sensory inputs to produce Pavlovian learning, emotional…
