Yeah, when I started studying neuroscience and the genetics of neurons I was kinda mind-blown by just how much change there is throughout the lifetime. There are certain things which are fairly static, like the long-range axons in your brain (aka spanning more than a millimeter). Other things, like the phenotype (the set of expressed genes) and the synapses change from second to second.
Indeed, it caused a bit of a fuss in the neuroscience community when enough evidence was gathered that we had to finally admit that the synapses/dendritic spines in the brain fluctuate too fast and chaotically to be the storage site of learned information that they were long thought to be. Other things may be, such as proteins that remain in place in the cell while the dendritic spine grows and collapses, or certain patterns of gene expression (triggered by reinforced synaptic activity during learning) which code for a propensity to form a synapse in a particular location… we just don’t know at this point.
Yeah, when I started studying neuroscience and the genetics of neurons I was kinda mind-blown by just how much change there is throughout the lifetime. There are certain things which are fairly static, like the long-range axons in your brain (aka spanning more than a millimeter). Other things, like the phenotype (the set of expressed genes) and the synapses change from second to second.
Indeed, it caused a bit of a fuss in the neuroscience community when enough evidence was gathered that we had to finally admit that the synapses/dendritic spines in the brain fluctuate too fast and chaotically to be the storage site of learned information that they were long thought to be. Other things may be, such as proteins that remain in place in the cell while the dendritic spine grows and collapses, or certain patterns of gene expression (triggered by reinforced synaptic activity during learning) which code for a propensity to form a synapse in a particular location… we just don’t know at this point.