By Lilit Dulyan / 8 January 2026 Picture two walnuts. At first, they look nearly identical. But take a closer look, and you’ll see differences in their shape, texture, and colour. Our brains are like that too. They follow a shared blueprint—folds, cells, and wiring—but the details vary from one person to the next.  More than a hundred years ago, doctors looked at brains after people died and noticed that no two had exactly the same pattern of bumps and grooves. Today, brain images show just...

Stephanie Forkel, Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant worth €2 million. Her five-year project, EMERGENCE, will begin in 2026 and aims to transform our understanding of how language arises from the complex interplay of neural systems in the human brain. For more than a century, theories of language have centred on a small set of cortical regions—most famously Broca’s area, associated with...

When operating on gliomas near critical language regions, surgeons risk either leaving residual tumor or inducing permanent postoperative language deficits (PLDs). Despite the advent of intraoperative mapping techniques, subjective judgments frequently determine important surgical decisions. We aim to inform data-driven surgery by constructing a non-invasive mapping approach that quantitatively predicts the impact of individual surgical decisions on long-term language function. This study...