China is assembling a vertically integrated neurotech stack, with state-backed companies advancing invasive BCIs, EEG platforms, neuromodulation, and imaging into structured clinical programs at growing scale.

Research reviewed in Nature Reviews Neuroscience shows light directly modulates attention, memory, and emotion via melanopsin retinal circuits, positioning illumination as an active input into human cognition rather than a passive background.

Consciousness research is shifting from mapping brain activity to testing competing theories, powered by new collaborations, neurotechnology, and AI. The stakes now extend beyond science into medicine, ethics, and law.

Neuromodulation is evolving fast. From non-invasive stimulation and ultrasound to implanted devices and genetic approaches, this guide maps the technologies reshaping brain treatment and enhancement.

Neurodegenerative diseases unfold over decades, but our data is fragmented and short-term. New computational models are beginning to reconstruct long-term disease timelines, with implications for trials, neurotech, and precision care.

CRISPR has become more than a gene-editing tool. In neuroscience, it is now used to modulate gene expression, build human brain models, trace development, and uncover disease pathways with unprecedented precision.

As neuroscience pushes toward more naturalistic and long-term experiments, new classes of neural interfaces are expanding what can be measured, manipulated, and integrated inside the living brain.

Understanding how drugs act on the living brain has long been a bottleneck in neuroscience. Advances in neuroimaging are beginning to make drug effects observable earlier, more precisely, and with far greater confidence.

Cities concentrate opportunity, but also stressors that subtly shape how we think, feel, and cope. From social fragmentation to pollution and light exposure, urban environments leave measurable traces on mental health.

Psychiatric diagnosis remains largely behavioural, despite growing biological insight. Emerging biomarkers in autism and schizophrenia hint at more precise, individualised care, but translation into clinical practice has proven difficult.