A group of researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland have found that when brain cells in the hippocampus communicate with each other, the signal that travels from an axon to a dendritic spine simultaneously stimulates multiple other spines in the same neighborhood. This multiple transmission of information may help us learn and store information more efficiently. Since the hippocampus forms part of the limbic system and plays a role in long-term memory and spatial navigation, whenever we stimulate these areas our abilities for memory and visuo-spatial processing increase accordingly. This cellular process of stimulating multiple dendrites is called clustered plasticity, which may help to account for the immense storage capacity of the brain. Read more about it here….

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurons, Neuropsychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.