Laura Sanders

Laura Sanders

Senior Writer, Neuroscience

Laura Sanders reports on neuroscience for Science News. She wrote Growth Curve, a blog about the science of raising kids, from 2013 to 2019 and continues to write about child development and parenting from time to time. She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she studied the nerve cells that compel a fruit fly to perform a dazzling mating dance. Convinced that she was missing some exciting science somewhere, Laura turned her eye toward writing about brains in all shapes and forms. She holds undergraduate degrees in creative writing and biology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she was a National Merit Scholar. Growth Curve, her 2012 series on consciousness and her 2013 article on the dearth of psychiatric drugs have received awards recognizing editorial excellence.

All Stories by Laura Sanders

  1. Health & Medicine

    Some brains may be primed for pain

    When people keep hurting long after an injury heals, a process similar to addiction may be at work.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Body and Brain

    Good touch, bad touch A leg caress can delight or feel totally skeevy, depending on who’s doing the caressing. A touch’s emotional baggage can be seen in the brain’s initial response to that touch, scientists report in the June 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Heterosexual men’s somatosensory cortices, brain regions that detect […]

  3. Health & Medicine

    Learn to play piano in your sleep

    That’s still impossible, but an experiment suggests hearing a previously learned ditty while snoozing improves later performance of the piece.

  4. Health & Medicine

    Like a prion, Alzheimer’s protein seeds itself in the brain

    Injecting amyloid-beta into mice may induce misfolding of native amyloid-beta molecules, leading to the buildup associated with the neuron-killing disease.

  5. Humans

    Color this chimp amazing

    An extra layer of sensory perception called synesthesia might help ape make a monkey of humans on memory tests.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Why antipsychotics need time to kick in

    Insight into how some schizophrenia drugs work may explain why compounds that build up in the brain can take weeks to provide relief.

  7. Life

    Treatment helps paralyzed rats walk

    A combination of drugs, electrical stimulation and therapy can restore lost connections between lower limbs and brain.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Scientists shouldn’t get hooked on notion that obesity reflects addiction to food

  9. Health & Medicine

    Thou can’t not covet

    Wanting what others have may be hardwired in the brain, experiments suggest.

  10. Schizophrenia’s core genetic features proposed

    Researchers may be closing in on the inherited component of a disease whose causes have been difficult to establish.

  11. Life

    Gene study links stronger memories, PTSD

    New finding may help explain why some people experience psychological problems after traumatic experiences.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Rare neurons found in monkeys’ brains

    Cells linked to empathy and consciousness in primates may offer clues to human self-awareness.