It has been shown that new neurons are able to be created in the brain
For the better part of the twentieth century, scientific dogma held that the brain was hardwired once fully developed in adolescence, meaning we’re born with all the neurons we’re going to get. We can rearrange synapses all we like, but we can only lose neurons.
But guess what? They do grow back — by the thousands. Not until scientists became handy with advanced imaging tools that enabled them to peer into the brain did they find conclusive evidence, which was published in a seminal 1998 paper. It came from an unlikely source. Cancer patients are sometimes injected with a dye that shows up in proliferating cells so that the spread of the disease can be tracked. Researchers looked at the brains of terminally ill patients who had donated their bodies to science and found that their hippocampi were packed with the dye marker, proof that neurons were dividing and propagating — a process called neurogenesis — just like cells in the rest of the body.
References
- Haley, J., John. Hagerman, Eric. (2008). Spark Chapter 2. Learning (EPub p. 54). New York, NY: Little Brown Spark.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️