Faced with changes in the surrounding world, the individual neurons reconfigure their own activity, but they do not forget those settings that use the “default”.
It is believed that the brain is constantly changing – just as the world is changing around us and if we are faced with something new, something unfamiliar, thanks to neural plasticity, we will quickly learn how to behave in this situation.
The neurons of the cerebral cortex of the mouse. (Photo by ZEISS Microscopy / www.flickr.com/photos/zeissmicro/10799674936.)
Under neural plasticity to understand the ability of neuronal connections to the restructuring, the establishment of new connections, new neural circuits are designed to solve new challenges. On the other hand, some things are so familiar that we do them without thinking, and all sorts of signals coming in already adult brain, are processed here for the usual, long-established scheme.
How is this assimilation of the new without destroying the old? The answer may seem fairly obvious: because the neurons can generate many connections, each cell is a constant, a kind of “backbone of the synapses”, which are responsible for long ago learned the routine, but when something new appears, the old constant relations are added to the fresh, “non-standard”. In theory, this hypothesis has long existed, but only now I’ve managed to confirm experimentally.
Researchers from the Institute of neuroscience Society max Planck experimented with mice that tying one eye, and then observed the activity of nerve cells in the visual cortex. It is known that when the brain stops receiving signals from one eye, the neurons that to him “assigned”, are beginning to respond to visual impulses from the other eye. With new genetic methods, it became possible to trace the activity of individual cells, and found that the combination of old and new, which we just discussed, takes place in the brain, literally at the cellular level.
In an article in Science , the authors write that the neurons closed eyes, as expected, switched to the data from the eyes open. But then when closed eyes opened again, the activity of nerve cells returned to the previous mode. The individual neurons would remember previous settings, and when the flow signal has returned to normal, that is, when worked over again with both eyes, the cells just “remembered” how the scheme then they must work.
Neuroscientists emphasize here some important features. First, reconfiguring relations occurred not at the level of cell populations, neural clusters, as expected, but at the level of individual cells. Secondly, from time to time, that is, when the replications of the experiment, changes of the same neurons, which accounted for about 2/3 of all cells in the visual cortex. The rest either didn’t pay any attention to the fact that one eye is closed, then open, or reacted in such a way that their behavior in the framework of a working hypothesis to explain it was extremely difficult.
What do these cells and what is their role in switching between the old and new, will be explored in further studies.
Author: Cyril Stasevich
Source: nkj.EN
