Adult Brains More Flexible Than Previously Thought

stemceller passed us a link to the official site for Johns Hopkins, which is reporting on some research into cognition. Generally, doctors have understood our best learning to be done at a young age, when the brain has a 'robust flexibility'. As we get older, our brain cells become 'hard-wired' along certain paths and don't move much - if at all. Or, at least, that was the understanding. Research headed by the hospital's Dr. Linden has taken advantage of 'two-photon microscopy', a new technique, to get a new picture inside a mouse's head. "They examined neurons that extend fibers (called axons) to send signals to a brain region called the cerebellum, which helps coordinate movements and sensory information. Like a growing tree, these axons have a primary trunk that runs upward and several smaller branches that sprout out to the sides. But while the main trunk was firmly connected to other target neurons in the cerebellum, stationary as adult axons are generally thought to be, 'the side branches swayed like kite tails in the wind,' says Linden. Over the course of a few hours, individual side branches would elongate, retract and morph in a highly dynamic fashion. These side branches also failed to make conventional connections, or synapses, with adjacent neurons. Furthermore, when a drug was given that produced strong electrical currents in the axons, the motion of the side branches stalled.'"

Comments

Scary combination

[MisterLawyer]

The bigger problem is that certain aspects of our modern technology allow young people these days do less to develop their minds than in past generations. It's like the Perfect Storm of humanity's brain evolution conflicting with our technology.

...neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

Here's another article on the same topic.

Re:Humans

[4D6963]

I've got a knife, you've got a brain... let's study this on your brain. ;-)

Must I understand that you don't have a brain? ;-)

Re:Adults can learn...

[Alioth]

I've always thought this - of course, I didn't have any scientific evidence, but my personal experience is I find learning easier now as an adult than I did as a child - the easier learning now because I have a more disciplined approach to learning and I'm much better able to stay the course. But the actual mechanism of learning something new, at least for me, doesn't appear to have faded at all. (In fact I enjoy it - my best days at work are when I'm doing something completely new and having to discover new things, and my hobbies all include learning new things).

That and the anecdotes of retired people learning new things with all the time they now have - such as a friend's father, who's a retired air force officer - doing a computer science degree in his 60s, and doing it as well as any college kid.