News & Views in 2020

A new study shows that mapping neural signals directly to word sequences produces lower error rates in speech decoding than previous methods that use motor or auditory based features. This suggests that using higher-level language goals can aid decoding algorithms for neural speech prostheses.

Motor learning is composed of explicit ‘strategic’ components and implicit ‘automatic’ components. Miyamoto and colleagues reveal how these components work together during visuomotor adaptation, providing evidence that an implicit component corrects for a noisy explicit process.

Three new studies show that activity-dependent formation of myelin contributes to memory consolidation and recall, possibly by increasing functional coupling between neuronal ensembles encoding experience.

Postmortem studies have previously suggested that adult olfactory neurogenesis occurs in humans. In new research, Durante and colleagues obtained fresh tissue from healthy adult humans via endoscopic nasal surgery and used single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to identify the entire neurogenic trajectory in the olfactory epithelium, confirming the existence of human olfactory neurogenesis.

Recent findings unveil a viral-like mechanism for the transmission of synaptic plasticity signals involving the activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc). Arc forms capsid-like particles that package RNA and are transported across synapses. Here Erlendsson et al. present a high-resolution structural representation of Arc capsids, enabling deeper analysis of their function.

Rewards direct behavioral adaptation through midbrain dopamine signaling, though the timing of those effects is often ambiguous. Lee and colleagues find that different subpopulations of dopamine neurons obey similar constraints, indirectly regulating reward-related behavior through learning mechanisms restricted to a brief time window following reward.