You may not be able to relive your youth, but part of your brain can. Johns Hopkins researchers have found that newly made nerves in an adult brain's learning center experience a one-month period when they are just as active as the nerves in a developing child. The study, appearing this week in Neuron, suggests that new adult nerves have a deeper role than simply replacing dead ones.
Song and his colleagues tracked the chemical signals received by newly made nerve cells in the adult mouse hippocampus, a brain structure dedicated to
learning and memory, by injecting virus particles to light up nerve progenitor cells. Any freshly made nerves glowed green and become permanently marked for later identification.
The brief heightened activity we saw may help explain how adults continue to adapt to new experiences even though adult brains are more hardwired than children's brains,
We might be able to rejuvenate an aging brain
clipped from: physorg.com