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The nervous system can drive the initiation, growth, spread, and therapy resistance of cancer, and cancer can manipulate the nervous system in ways that further support disease progression. Tumors growing within the brain or elsewhere in the body connect with neuronal networks in circuit-specific manners, via neuron-to-cancer synaptic interactions and paracrine crosstalk. Moreover, neural factors govern critical components of the tumor environment, such as the immune system, and cancer can use neural mechanisms in a malignant cell-intrinsic manner. Here we provide a personal view on the burgeoning field of cancer neuroscience and highlight the need to approach cancer research from a neuroscience perspective — together with neuroscientists.

Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTSP induction follows patterned dynamics, is higher in new contexts and lower in CA3 than CA1.

We modeled how the hippocampus can construct new cognitive maps from reusable building blocks (structural elements) represented in cortex. This composition supported latent learning and rapid generalization, and predicted the emergence of place responses in replay, which we discovered empirically in an existing dataset.

Lewy body disease (LBD) pathology can first spread from the brain or the body. A study of two large postmortem datasets reveals that there are not one but two possible trajectories originating in the body for LBD progression at its earliest stages, spreading via either sympathetic or parasympathetic nerve pathways to reach the brain.

The authors show that behavior and dopamine responses track prospective, but not retrospective, contingency. These results are explained by temporal difference (TD) learning models, indicating that TD errors are a measure of contingency.

Targeting the endothelium across ages and neurodegenerative diseases in 92 donors with single-cell inCITE-seq reveals similar alterations in ~40% of capillaries in AD, ALS and FTD. Endothelial TDP-43 loss coincides with increased nuclear p65/NF-κB activity and reduced Wnt/β-catenin.

Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of downstream decision making.

This postmortem study identifies brain-first and two body-first subtypes in prediagnostic cases of Lewy body disease. It highlights sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways in body-first disease, advancing insights on disease onset and progression.

Cholinergic interneurons act at nicotinic receptors to depress dopamine release, interrupting its relationship to dopamine neuron firing and supporting an inverse scaling of dopamine release according to cholinergic activity.

A new study challenges the classic view of memory consolidation as a delayed, offline process by showing that neural reactivation, which is crucial for memory consolidation, occurs rapidly during awake encoding intervals. These findings suggest that consolidation can occur dynamically in brief, task-related downtimes.

Cheng et al. identify a mitochondrial complex IV (CIV) deficiency in the brains of patients with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They demonstrate that defects in mitochondrial CIV induce ALS-like phenotypes in rats and highlight CIV deficiency as a potential risk factor and therapeutic target for ALS.

How can the brain improve memory for an experience after it has occurred? Halpern et al. use intracranial EEG to show that, even while processing current experiences, people reactivate old ones and re-encode them, turning thoughts into memories.

The scientific study of consciousness was sanctioned as an orthodox field of study only three decades ago. Since then, a variety of prominent theories have flourished, including integrated information theory, which has been recently accused of being pseudoscience by more than 100 academics. Here we critically assess this charge and offer thoughts to elevate the clash into positive lessons for our field.

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

During foraging with threat–reward conflicts in mice, dopamine modulates two competing neuron types in the striatum for flexible threat coping, from initial threat avoidance to eventual overcoming of the threat.

A model of compositional state spaces in the hippocampus shows latent learning and rapid generalization. Bakermans et al. show that this model predicts the emergence of place responses in replay.