Today we have published a new review that was inspired by the controversy over whether adult neurogenesis occurs in humans: JS Snyder (2019) Trends in Neurosciences, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2018.12.001 ABSTRACT: Conflicting reports about whether adult hippocampal neurogenesis occurs in humans raise questions about its significance for human health and the relevance of animal…
The latest study in the saga that is adult neurogenesis was just published today: Sorrells et al, (2018) Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature25975 I wrote a brief piece for Nature News and Views but since they have very strict space limitations I…
As I’ve alluded, science, and therefore the SFN meeting where much science is unveiled, is a cycle of confusion and clarification. Currently, confusion may be prevailing in the adult hippocampal neurogenesis field since new neurons have been implicated in everything mammals do – spatial and nonspatial memory, anxiety, depression, addiction,…
It’s hard to explore SFN when you’ve got your own poster to tend to. I thought I could hop around the development section before things got busy but there was no “before things got busy.” The design of the conference also can work against presenters because the presentations you’d like…
Figshare is one of the greatest new tools for scientists. It allows you to publish any piece of data, no matter how small or insignificant, in a citable fashion. This is a big deal because ALL scientists have (tons of) data of this sort. Pilot experiments are performed to get the…
For obvious reasons, studying neurogenesis in primates is useful. Primates are phylogenetically more related to us than rodents, and so understanding their nervous system can better help us to understand our own. For over a decade we have known that neurogenesis continues in adulthood in primates and in many ways,…
Everybody knows what the hippocampus is for: memory. And…maybe something about anxiety or depression? Yes – over the last 10 years or so many studies have been published showing that the hippocampus has these two roles and that the mnemonic and emotional functions of the hippocampus are associated with its…
Wiring. That’s one answer to this question. We know this from topographic maps in the thalamus and neocortex, where the basic units of sensory information are neatly represented in spatially-arranged populations of neurons – the various body parts are represented in specific locations, as are the different frequencies of sound, the different…
As we accumulate more and more data on adult neurogenesis in rodents I keep asking myself what kind of impact these new cells could have. The dearth of literature on primate and human adult neurogenesis seems to make these questions all the more relevant. As a starting point, I created…
If you’ve been paying attention to the adult hippocampal neurogenesis literature at all, you noticed that “pattern separation” is gaining popularity as a research topic. A few quick searches on Pubmed confirm that a trend is indeed afoot. For the years prior to 1999, only 15 Pubmed-indexed papers answer to…