keeping human new brain cells

How to keeping human brain cells

So it turns out that your brain is a nursery: every day, it seems, new brain cells are born. But it seems that your brain doesn't always keep these newborn neurons. Just like all other babies, they need special care to survive. And it's not pampering: your newborn neurons, scientists are finding, need to be challenged, exercised, and run hard. 

If you don't use those new cells, they will disappear. Animal research shows that most of these cells die within a couple of weeks unless that brain is challenged to learn something new and, preferably, something hard that involves a great deal of effort. And new is key here as well: just repeating old activities won't support new brain cells.

 Scientists still don't really know why or what the heck the new neurons are doing or even why we make them. Are they made to replace dying cells? One theory is that they are backup, produced just in case they are needed. This idea suggests that your brain calls for reinforcements when new brain cells are available to aid in situations that tax the mind, and that a mental workout can buff up the brain much as physical exercise builds up the body

 In animal studies, scientists found that between five thousand and ten thousand new neurons arise in the rat hipclocampus every day (it's not known how many we humans make, or how often). The birth rate depends on some environmental factors. Heavy alcohol consumption slows the production. for example, whereas exercise increases it. Rats and mice that log time on a running wheel kick out twice as many new cells as do mice that lead a more sedentary life. Even eating antioxidant-rich blueberries seems to goose the generation of new neurons in the rat hippocampus, as do exciting changes in their cages or new toys to pique their interest.

 Elizabeth Gould (a discoverer of neurogenesis in adults), Tracy Stars, and colleagues have been examining the connection between learning and neurogenesis by studying the brains of rats and the importance of hard learning. In their experiments, they first injected the animals with BrdU (bromodeoxyuridine), a drug that marks only brand-new cells. A week later, they recruited half of the treated rats for a training program and let the rest lounge around their home cages. 

The rats enrolled in Rodent University were given an cyeblink course: an animal hears a tone and then, sonic fixed time later (usually 500 milliseconds, or half a second), gets hit in the eye with a puff of air or a mild stimulation of the eyelid, which causes the animal to blink After several hundred trials, the animal learns to connect the tone with the stimulus, anticipate when the stimulus will arrive, and