There is a pressing need for drugs that effectively control pharmaco-resistant seizures and prevent their generation. In this Review, Vezzani and co-workers discuss the interconnected roles of mTOR signalling and neuroinflammatory processes in epileptogenesis, and how targeting these pathways might prove useful therapeutically.

Ning-long Xu discusses a 1999 paper that outlined a mechanism by which cortical pyramidal neurons integrate layer-specific inputs.

How does motor-cortex activity well before movement not drive motor outputs? In this Review, Churchland and Shenoy detail how searching for answers transitioned the understanding of neural activity during movement from single-neuron tuning towards population-level factors and revealed an essential computational role of output-null factors.

Sleep is an active state during which the synaptic connections that form memories are remodelled. In this Perspective, Wassing and colleagues discuss how failures in sleep-dependent adaptation to emotionally distressing experiences might be a key contributor to post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions.

A large network of brain regions is involved in salient distractor processing.

A new study captures nearly the full repertoire of primate natural behaviour and reveals that highly distributed cortical activity maintains multifaceted dynamic social relationships.

The synaptic protein SynGAP exerts its effects on synaptic plasticity via a structural role rather than its GTPase-activating protein activity.

One of the long-term sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection is ‘brain fog’, which is shown in this study to be linked to systemic inflammation and leakiness of the blood–brain barrier.

Neurons in the mouse subiculum encode concave and convex geometrical environmental features.

Ning-long Xu discusses a 1999 paper that outlined a mechanism by which cortical pyramidal neurons integrate layer-specific inputs.