Word: gould
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...shooters all come back as prairie dogs! ALLENE GOULD Lake Oswego...
Studies with adult monkeys in the mid-1960s seemed to support the belief that the supply of neurons is fixed at birth. Hence the surprise when Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross of Princeton University reported last year that the monkeys they studied seemed to be minting thousands of new neurons a day in the hippocampus of their brain. Even more jarring, Gould and Cross found evidence that a steady stream of the fresh cells may be continually migrating to the cerebral cortex...
That may yet turn out to be the case with the neurons found by the Princeton lab. The mechanism Gould and her colleagues uncovered in macaque monkeys could be nothing more than a useless evolutionary leftover, a kind of neurological appendix. But if, as many suspect, the new neurons turn out to be actively involved with inscribing memories, the old paradigm is in for at least a minor tune-up--and maybe a complete overhaul...
...telling that the spawning ground for the neurons is the hippocampus, which is indisputably crucial to memory. Patients with hippocampal injuries lose their ability to acquire new facts, though they can still recall impressions laid down in the years before the damage occurred. Maybe, Gould speculates, the newly generated hippocampal neurons are especially agile in forming connections with one another. As in the canaries, the new cells would readily join hands to encode a new memory. Then, when they were no longer needed, they would be flushed from the system, and the engram would be transferred elsewhere for safekeeping...
...Perhaps, Gould and her colleagues ventured in a recent paper, this purported transport mechanism provides a means of time-stamping memories, helping us keep track of when we learned what. Older memories would be somehow associated with older neurons. No one is even guessing how this might work. But if memories are indeed flowing through the brain in rivulets of new neurons, then all the old ideas will have to be reconsidered...