Improved living conditions for rats has been shown to increase neural branching well past midlife

Laboratory work on the brain and clinical experience with human beings have opened up a world of possibilities. “The mammalian brain appears to have the capacity to remain responsive to environmental enrichment well into advanced age,” writes Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, a noted brain researcher at the University of California’s Department of Anatomy–Physiology in Berkeley. In her laboratory, rats ranging from newborns to elderly were kept in varying degrees of social isolation, stimulation, and environmental and nutritional enrichment. Autopsies showed that the layers of the cortex in the brains of the environmentally favored rats were thicker, their neurons larger, their branching more elaborate, their blood supply richer. Enriched rats well past midlife could still grow connecting branches almost twice as long as their “standard” cousins, after only thirty days of differential treatment. Dr. Diamond reports these results in her book Enriching Heredity: The Impact of the Environment on the Anatomy of the Brain. “Perhaps the single most valuable piece of information learned from all our studies,” she writes, “is that structural differences can be detected in the cerebral cortices of animals exposed at any age to different levels of stimulation in the environment … at any age studied, we have shown anatomical effects due to enrichment or impoverishment.” Most encouraging was Dr. Diamond’s finding that even the brains of animals deprived before birth, or deliberately damaged in infancy, were able to compensate by structural changes in response to enriched living conditions. “Thus,” she writes, “we must not give up on people who begin life under unfavorable conditions. Environmental enrichment has the potential to enhance their brain development too, depending on the degree or severity of the insult.”

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References

• Mate, Gabor. (1999). Scattered Minds Chapter 16. It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over Unconditional Positive Regard (p. 163). London, UK: Random House.

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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️