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

    Rats avoiding mental workloads offer clues to lower motivation in depression

  2. Health & Medicine

    Attention tunes the mind’s ear

    Brain activity shows how one voice pattern stands out from the crowd.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Movie clips help ease drug craving

    Images of heroin may prove useful in treating addiction.

  4. Health & Medicine

    Why emotions are attention-getters

    Strong, direct connections between two key brain centers help explain how feelings can usurp focus.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Extreme eaters show abnormal brain activity

    Seeing images of food revs up reward areas in the obese and slows them down in severely underweight people, a brain scan study shows.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Jolt to brain aids language recovery

    Stroke patients treated with brain stimulation show improvement in language skills.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Brain scan foretells who will fold under pressure

    Tests on high-stakes math problems reveal key regions of brain activity linked to choking under pressure.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Mapping the brain’s superhighways

    New scans created using diffusion MRI technique reveal an order to information flow in the mind.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Slacker rat, worker rat

    Rodent work ethic, like people’s, comes in two types.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Fatty diet leads to fat-loving brain cells

    A study in mice links a high-fat diet to changes in the brain that might encourage weight gain.

  11. Life

    Making mouse memories

    Neuroscientists create a synthetic recollection of fear in rodents.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Cell phone research suggests fetal risk

    Constant exposure of pregnant mice to devices’ radiation is linked to behavioral and brain abnormalities in offspring.