The debate over how long our brains keep making new nerve cells heats up
The debate over how long our brains keep making new nerve cells heats up Adult mice and other rodents sprout new nerve cells in memory-related parts of their brains. People, not so much. That’s the surprising conclusion of a series of experiments on human brains of various ages first described at a meeting in November . A more complete description of the finding, published online March 7 in Nature , gives heft to the controversial result, as well as ammo to researchers looking for reasons to be skeptical of the findings. In contrast to earlier prominent studies, Shawn Sorrells of the University of California, San Francisco and his colleagues failed to find newborn nerve cells in the memory-related hippocampi of adult brains. The team looked for these cells in nonliving brain samples in two ways: molecular markers that tag dividing cells and young nerve cells, and telltale shapes of newborn cells. Using these metrics, the researchers saw signs of n...