Plasticity Post Brain Injury

The brain is heavily interconnected with neuron pathways. According to life scientists from UCLA and Sydney Australia’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, you can get from any neuron in the brain to any other neuron via about six synaptic connections. New research has revealed that when the hippocampus, the brain’s primary learning and memory center, is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function. And these circuits can be some distance from the hippocampus. In the prefrontal cortex, for example. Their breakthrough discovery, the first demonstration of such neural-circuit plasticity, could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and other conditions involving damage to the brain.

Moriel Zelikowsky et al., Prefrontal microcircuit underlies contextual learning after hippocampal loss, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1301691110