Aussie Scientists Discover Brain-Healing Mechanism

MQBS writes "Researchers at the University of Queensland have discovered a way to make the brain heal itself. The article is a bit light on detail but it looks fairly important (at least to the unknowledgable about advanced neuroscience (like me)). I like the part about incrased memory... anyone care to be a complete GNU/Linux source code concordance ^_^?"

Comments

big news

[d_i_r_t_y]

this is big news folks... isolating a particular type of stem cell is approaching the level of finding a holy grail. while differentiation, the process by which stem cells (which can become theoretically any type of cell) actually become a differentiated cell-type (eg a muscle cell, or an adipocyte, a fat cell) is poorly understood, isolating (and then being able to maintain and grow) a neural stem cell line is a big step (well, it was when i was doing my undergrad circa 5 years ago..).

go the green and gold.

This is nice, but..

[ballzhey]

We really don't need increased memory, we need increased working memory to hold more that 5-10 activation patterns or concepts in our head at a time. Why?
There is no know limit to the amount of information that the brain can encode in long term memory since the brain is a distributed system (one neuron doesn't correspond to one item, it's only a component in a vector) and since the brain has 10^12 neurons with and avg of 10,000 connection each.
Adding cells is the trivial solution.
We could take invitro ones and put them in your head 75+ years ago if we wanted.
Hooking them up to do something useful would be the problem since everyone's head is already wired differently and we really would not know how to signal the new neurons to form new connections without messing the old connections up.

By the way, we need to give up the new addage that learning/ encoding new memories should be fast like in the Matrix. Learning is slow on purpose. If you are interested read Kandel and Schwart (2000). It's only 1414 pages.