Current Issue
- March 25, 2025
- vol. 122
- no. 12
- What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines—from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology. An empirical approach is to test whether the system in question recruits the brain system that ...What constitutes a language? Natural languages share features with other domains: from math, to music, to gesture. However, the brain mechanisms that process linguistic input are highly specialized, showing little response to diverse nonlinguistic tasks. ...
- Transoceanic dispersal to far-away islands is an important mechanism for the generation of new species lineages and biotas and has captivated scientists since at least the time of Darwin. Determining whether and how such events occur is ...Founder-event speciation can occur when one or more organisms colonize a distant, unoccupied area via long-distance dispersal, leading to the evolution of a new species lineage. Species radiations established by long-distance, and especially transoceanic, ...
PNAS is one of the world's most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide.

In the News
- Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving ...Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In ...
- In sophisticated auditory–motor learning such as musical instrument learning, little is understood about how brain plasticity develops over time and how the related individual variability is reflected in the neural architecture. In a ...The auditory and motor neural systems are closely intertwined, enabling people to carry out tasks such as playing a musical instrument whose mapping between action and sound is extremely sophisticated. While the dorsal auditory stream has been shown to ...
- In the midst of rapid globalization, the peaceful coexistence of cultures requires a deeper understanding of the forces that compel prosocial behavior and thwart xenophobia. Yet, the conditions promoting such outgroup-directed altruism have ...Never before have individuals had to adapt to social environments defined by such magnitudes of ethnic diversity and cultural differentiation. However, neurobiological evidence informing about strategies to reduce xenophobic sentiment and foster ...
Front Matter
Featured QnAs
Recent Issues
Submit to PNAS
Submit to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and have your research discovered by millions of researchers in the biological, physical, and social sciences.
Submit your manuscript