Posts Tagged ‘myelin’
How the Tremendous Boost in Brain Power Arose Suddenly in Evolution–The Mystery of Myelin
“Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?” — Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin proposed that evolution is driven by gradual variations in organisms that have survival advantage in a changing environment, but he recognized that new traits often…
Read MoreDonald Trump Is No Brain Scientist
Yesterday on an international stage in Davos, Switzerland, President Donald Trump dismissed the reported injuries of American troops being treated for traumatic brain injury in Germany after an Iranian missile attack on the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. No matter what one’s political views may be, Trump’s uninformed and potentially damaging pronouncement cannot go uncorrected. I have…
Read MoreMaking Long-term Memories Depends on Making Myelin and Brainwaves
Neuroscientists have always presumed that learning and memory depend on strengthening or weakening the connection points between neurons (synapses), increasing or decreasing the likelihood that the cell is going to pass along a message to its neighbor. But recently some researchers have started pursuing a completely different theory that does not involve changing the strength of synaptic…
Read MoreThe Brain’s White Matter–Learning beyond Synapses
Recently scientists have been exploring part of the brain that has been relatively unexplored in learning–white matter, comprising half of the human brain. Here new research is detecting cellular changes during learning that are entirely different from the synaptic changes between neurons in gray matter. A new study shows that learning a new motor skill…
Read MoreMap the Brain–Not Just Neurons
Our understanding of one half of the brain (the part comprised of astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and microglia) lags a century behind our knowledge of neurons.
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