Your Brain Quietly Rewrites Reality Depending on Your State of Mind [View all]

By Picower Institute at MIT
November 25, 2025
5 Mins Read

Researchers found that the prefrontal cortex customizes its signals to the brain’s visual and motor systems, shaping perception based on arousal and movement. Two key regions balance each other to sharpen or suppress visual information as needed.

How Brain State and Behavior Shape What Mice See

Vision guides how animals behave, and new work from MIT neuroscientists shows that the reverse is also true: behavior and internal states influence how visual information is processed. In research published today (November 25) in Neuron, the team reports that in mice, specific circuits allow the brain’s executive hub, the prefrontal cortex, to send customized signals to areas involved in vision and movement. These messages help adjust how those regions operate based on conditions such as the mouse’s arousal level or whether it is actively moving.

“That’s the major conclusion of this paper: There are targeted projections for targeted impact,” said senior author Mriganka Sur, Paul and Lilah Newton Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Exploring How the Prefrontal Cortex Communicates

Scientists have long suspected, including Sur’s colleague Earl K. Miller next door at MIT, that the prefrontal cortex influences how more posterior cortical areas handle information. Anatomical evidence has supported this view. The new study, led by postdoctoral researcher Sofie Ährlund-Richter in the Sur Lab, set out to determine whether the prefrontal cortex sends a single broad signal or instead tailors its output for different downstream targets. She also aimed to reexamine which specific neurons these signals reach and how this input affects each region’s function.

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