Neurons Generated in The Adult Brain Learn To Respond To Novel Stimuli. A study at Mass General Hospital finds new neurons develop in the brain well into adulthood. Even better news: those neurons are flexible enough to aid learning and memory. The catch is the brains were in mice and in the part of their brain that deals with sense of smell. No small thing for a mouse; they gotta be able to continuously adapt their sense of smell to survive and do mousely things.

The implications are pretty exciting of course. To be able to adapt these new neurons to repair damaged brain tissue would give hope in a lot of conditions considered fairly hopeless today.

But the thing that interests me most here is the role of experience, of behavior and environment, in using the new neurons. It took placing the mice in a novel environment to reveal just how dramatic this generation of new neurons could be. It takes structure and function together to make meaningful change in almost any context I can think of.

Learning is key. It's what builds on the new tissues to allow change in functioning:

An associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, (Jeffrey) Macklis also notes, "These results can contribute to our efforts, and those of others in the field, to repair diseased brain and spinal cord by directed development of specific neurons from precursor/stem cells. Our experiments show that new neurons can join brain circuits and function in complex ways - contributing to learning, memory and potentially to motor function - and that we may need to retrain the brain to use the new neurons effectively."(emphasis mine).