Baby neurons glue new memories

[HuckleB]

http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55385/

"New findings suggest a hypothesis for a much-debated question in neuroscience : what exactly is the role of new neurons born in the adult human brain? These brain cells may help link memories of events that occurred within a week or two of each other, a paper published in Neuron reports.

"It's really novel, and I think it's quite informative," said behavioral neuroscientist neuroscientist Andrea Chiba of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work.

Fred Gage a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., published a controversial study in 1998 identifying the formation of new neurons in the adult hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory. Til then, neuroscience dogma had held that humans are born with all of the neurons they will ever have. But the function of these newly formed cells has never been identified.

In the current study, Gage and his colleagues built a computational model to capture how neurons form, make connections, and integrate into existing brain circuitry. The team modeled the dentate gyrus, the area of the hippocampus where these cells are generated, as a network with multiple layers of different types of cells, only one of which can grow new brain cells. When a neuron fires, it sends information to other neurons in the circuit, which also fire if they receive enough stimulation. New neurons take fewer input signals from other cells to fire. Over time, each cell's firing pattern comes to reflect the inputs they receive, Gage said.

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Cool stuff.