Baby neurons glue new memories

New findings suggest a hypothesis for a much-debated question in neuroscience : what exactly is the role of new neurons born in the adult human brain? These brain cells may help link memories of events that occurred within a week or two of each other, a paper published in Neuron reports. "It's really novel, and I think it's quite informative," said behavioral neuroscientist linkurl:Andrea Chiba;http://neurograd.ucsd.edu/faculty/detail.php?id=21 of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work. linkurl:Fred Gage;http://www.salk.edu/faculty/faculty_details.php?id=23, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., published a linkurl:controversial study;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9547229?ordinalpos=60&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSumin in 1998 identifying the formation of new neurons in the adult hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory. Til then, neuroscience dogma had held that humans are born with all of the neurons they will ever have. But the function of these newly formed cells has never been identified. In the current study, Gage and...