BDNF is necessary for LTP to be able to occur
BDNF Is important not merely for the survival of neurons but also for their growth (sprouting new dendrite branches) and thus for learning. Eero Castrén, as well as Susan Patterson from Kandel’s lab at Columbia, found that if you stimulate LTP in mice by making them learn, BDNF levels increase. Looking inside their brains, researchers determined that mice without BDNF lose their capacity for LTP; conversely, injecting BDNF directly into the brains of rats encouraged LTP. Then one of Carl Cotman’s former postdoctoral students, neurosurgeon Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, showed that if you neutralize BDNF in mice, they are slow to find their way out of a pool having a hidden platform.
in a 2007 study of humans, German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise. exercise has been shown to raise levels of BDNF, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF. Along with that, people with a gene variation that robs them of BDNF are more likely to have learning deficiencies.
References
- Haley, J., John. Hagerman, Eric. (2008). Spark Chapter 2. Learning (p. 54). New York, NY: Little Brown Spark.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️