News

Five University of Texas at Austin faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society, including four from the College of Natural Sciences.

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can now map what happens neurologically when new information influences a person to change his or her mind, a finding that offers more insight into the mechanics of learning.

Ila Fiete, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience, is the first faculty member from The University of Texas at Austin to receive recognition through a new program from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She joins 83 early-career scientists from across the nation who have been chosen for the Faculty Scholars Program.

This week, Matt Damon returns to the big screen as Jason Bourne, a secret agent who has forgotten his entire life and is piecing it back together while confronting political and economic conflicts. We wondered how realistically the series depicts brain science.

Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. It's a warning that echoes throughout the halls of science, but is not always heeded. A new study in the journal Nature by associate professor Alex Huk and graduate students Leor Katz and Jacob Yates provides a perfect case study.

Michael Drew, an assistant professor of neuroscience, was one of 11 University of Texas at Austin faculty members chosen to receive prestigious 2016 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards from The University of Texas System Board of Regents.

You may have heard of serotonin, a chemical found throughout the brain that regulates a host of mental states such as mood, appetite and alertness. When we have enough of it, we have an overall sense of wellbeing and happiness. When we're running low on it, we can experience depression.

Neuroscientists from The University of Texas at Austin and the Salk Institute have discovered that connections between brain cells, called synapses, can be grouped into more discrete sizes than was previously thought, and these discrete sizes are thought to predict different functional states.

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a mechanism that may explain how the brain can recall nearly all of what happened on a recent afternoon — or make a thorough plan for how to spend an upcoming afternoon — in a fraction of the time it takes to live out the experience. The breakthrough in understanding a previously unknown function in the brain has implications for research into schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer's disease and other disorders where real experiences and ones that exist only in the mind can become distorted.