E.G. (a pseudonym) is an accomplished woman in her early 60s. She has a stellar vocabulary and has mastered a foreign language (Russian) to the point that she sometimes dreams in it. She also has, likely since birth, been missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain known to be critical for language. A new study of her brain reveals critical insights into the brain's organization and functioning.

A common sign of Alzheimer’s disease is the excessive buildup of two types of protein in the brain: tangles of tau proteins that accumulate inside cells, and amyloid-β proteins that form plaques outside the cells. Researchers don’t know how these protein deposits are related to the other major hallmark of the disease: the death of neurons in the brain. A study by scientists at MIT's Broad Institute, BCS, and Harvard hints at some answers to this question.

The cerebral cortex produces perception based on sensory information fed through the thalamus. Neuroscientists have struggled to understand how it works so well, given the relative paucity of observed connections between the two regions. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, MIT researchers report that thalamic inputs into superficial layers of the cortex are surprisingly weak and quite diverse in their distribution patterns. Despite this, they are reliable and efficient representatives of information in the aggregate, and their diversity is what underlies these advantages.