It’s been a long week and right now I feel like large portions of my brain have shorted out or maybe simply evaporated. It seems like what I heard while I was growing up was that you had a fixed amount of brain cells and while you might inadvertently kill some of them off, you never got any new ones. I don’t really think I destroyed an inordinate number of neurons this week, of course, but still it’s encouraging to see more evidence for neurogenesis, the growth of new brain cells, in adult humans. This article from New Scientist describes the discovery, in adult human brains, of newly created brain cells in a part of the brain that processes smells. Researchers also found a cache of brain stem cells (basically proto-neurons) deep in the brain and a pair of tiny tubes that act as a highway from that stem cell reservoir to the olfactory bulb where the new brain cells were found.
Evidence of adult neurogenesis
