The field of cognitive neuroscience is relatively new – only around one hundred years old – so it’s no surprise that we are constantly arriving at a newer and better understanding of how the neural circuitry of the human brain supports overall brain functioning.
For most of those one hundred years, it was believed that once damaged, the brain could not regenerate. Brain cells were finite, and any loss or injury would be suffered as a deficiency for the rest of that person’s life. This created a false belief that the brain is essentially in a perpetual state of decline.
Although compelling evidence to the contrary was presented as early as 1960, medical dogma was (and is) slow to change. It wasn’t until the 1980’s when Fernando Nottebohm’s research at Rockefeller University clearly indicated that neurogenesis – production of new nerve cells, aka neurons – was taking place in the adult vertebrate brain.
The next big step in
this scientific evolution would take more than thirty years. However,
the pace of our understanding of how the brain is wired was about to
take a quantum leap....<<<Read More>>>...
