Adulthood was supposed to be a long period of mental decline, as brain cells slowly died off and no new ones were born. Neurobiologist Fred Gage at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overturned conventional wisdom by proving that fresh cells keep growing in the human hippocampus, a brain region critical to learning and memory.
Why does it matter that some brain cells can regenerate? If we can understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that create new neurons in a normal brain, we may be able to recruit these cells to repair damage in injured brains.
You've found that exercising mice grow twice as many new brain cells as inactive mice. Does this mean that if we exercise regularly we'll improve our brainpower? There's evidence that exercise is associated with improved learning and memory, and also decreases depression. We can speculate these changes may result from the creation of ...
