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  • Focus |

    Addiction incurs enormous medical, economic and social costs. The currently available pharmacotherapies for addiction are only moderately effective, which further emphasizes the need to improve our understanding of the changes that are induced in the brain by addictive substances. This Focus issue features five articles that discuss recent insights into the neurobiology of addiction — from the molecular to the behavioural level — and highlight the importance of these findings for the development of new treatments.

  • Focus |

    Evolutionary biology seeks to reconstruct the ancestral relationship among organisms and the pathways that led to the enormous variety of biological forms. This focus issue of Nature Reviews Neurosciencecelebrates the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago. The articles in this special issue discuss the molecular, cellular and structural changes that have contributed to CNS evolution and the functional consequences of these changes.

  • Focus |

    Everyone experiences stress occasionally, but severe or chronic stress can have long-lasting effects on brain structure and function. This Focus issue highlights the latest advances in our understanding of how the brain responds to stress, the mechanisms that mediate the beneficial and adverse effects of stress on brain functioning, and factors that confer vulnerability and resilience to stress.

  • Focus |

    Since the surprising finding that injured axons in the mature central nervous system can re-grow, there has been dramatic progress in our understanding of the molecular, cellular and circuitry level responses to injuries to the adult mammalian central nervous system. This special Focus issue highlights recent developments in this field, with a view to understanding the underlying mechanisms that will enable the development of appropriate therapeutic strategies.

  • Focus |

    The essential element in pain is the activation of specialized high-threshold receptors to warn the organism of potential tissue damage. This sensory signal is followed, at least in humans, by a less well-defined but strong emotional experience - we are irresistably driven to stop the pain or escape from the stimulus that causes it.

  • Focus |

    Neurons that fire high-frequency bursts of spikes are found in various sensory systems. Although the functional implications of burst firing might differ from system to system, bursts are often thought to represent a distinct mode of neuronal signalling.

  • Focus |

    In the past three decades, cognitive neuroscience has become an important force in humanity's efforts to understand itself. To celebrate this diverse and exciting field, we bring you this special focus issue on cognitive neuroscience.

  • Focus |

    Some might argue that there is not much neuroscience left in the study of ion channels when the key experiments are carried out at the synchrotron and their interpretation involves atomic coordinates instead of picoamperes. But the truth is that crystallographic analysis has opened our eyes to new principles of channel function and is beginning to answer questions that neuroscientists have been asking for a long time.

  • Focus |

    The adult brain is undoubtedly fascinating, but developmental neuroscientists are more concerned with the journey that brings it to this state than with the destination itself. In fact, it might be argued that the journey never really ends because neuronal circuits in the brain are continually modified throughout life.