Stroke survivors who have attended some level of higher education may face even steeper mental declines, according to a study led by Michigan Medicine. The findings suggest that attending higher education may enable people to retain greater cognitive ability until a critical threshold of brain injury is reached after a stroke.

People with autism are typically diagnosed by clinical observation and assessment. To deconstruct the clinical decision process, which is often subjective and difficult to describe, researchers used a large language model (LLM) to synthesize the behaviors and observations that are most indicative of an autism diagnosis. Their results, publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell, show that repetitive behaviors, special interests, and perception-based behaviors are most associated with an autism diagnosis. These findings have potential to improve diagnostic guidelines for autism by decreasing the focus on social factors—which the established guidelines in the DSM-5 focus on but the model did not classify among the most relevant in diagnosing autism. 

By watching the ebb and flow of the brain’s chemical signals, researchers are beginning to disentangle the molecular mechanisms underlying the intrinsic motivation to learn. In a new study of zebra finches published in Nature, researchers show that a hit a dopamine tells baby birds when their song practice is paying off. The findings suggest that dopamine acts like an internal “compass” to steer their learning when external incentives are absent.