From reading the words in this newsletter, to tasting coffee on your tongue, to feeling excitement at the prospect of lunch, your experiences are the work of your nerve cells. So are your moods, chains of reasoning, and good and less good habits. The whole panoply of human experience can be found in electrochemical pulses passed along and between the 90bn nerve cells, also known as neurons, that make up the brain.

The brain is so complex that scientific understanding of it can seem decades behind that of other organs. But neuroscience is undergoing a renaissance. Many of our recent articles, such as our recent Technology Quarterly on fixing the brain, probe these new approaches. Others focus on fresh discoveries, such as the link between playing a musical instrument and better cognition or the fact that new fathers’ cerebrums shrink. Whichever articles you read from the selection below, we hope that they will make you think differently.