Within the nucleus of a developing human brain cell, genes do not merely exist—they move, and where they come to rest determines whether they speak or stay silent. A new study mapping this spatial choreography in fetal cortical tissue has found that as stem cells mature into neurons, hundreds of genes migrate from the suppressive edges of the nucleus toward active processing centers, and that this journey correlates directly with their activation. Among the travelers are genes already implicated in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions, suggesting that some disorders long attributed t