IUBio

brain development and stimulation

Stephen Black sblack at UBISHOPS.CA
Sat Apr 26 22:32:00 EST 1997


On 26 Apr 1997, Brian Scott wrote:

> Those of you in this thread might also be interested in a recent Nature 
> article (sorry but I don't have the reference right now but Khun and 
> Gould are two of the authors and I think it's April) which found 
> that rats raised in "enriched" environments actually have an increase in 
> the number of hippocampal granule neurons produced post-natally.  So not 
> only are there more synapses, there are actually more neurons with which 
> to make those synapses.  
>   
> They also found that the enriched animals performed better on the Morris 
> Water Maze test of spatial learning.
> 
> I think I agree with Stephen Black's comment in a previous post that these 
> seem to be more like deprivation experiments though.
> 

The article is:

(summary from the Nature web page)

G Kempermann, H G Kuhn & F H Gage 
More hippocampal neurons in adult mice living in an enriched 
environment (Letter to Nature) 
Nature 386, 493 (1997) 

Neurogenesis occurs in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus throughout the
life of a rodent, but the function of these new neurons and the mechanisms
that regulate their birth are unknown. Here the authors show that
significantly more new neurons exist in the dentate gyrus of mice exposed
to an enriched environment compared with littermates housed in standard
cages. They also show, using unbiased stereology, that the enriched mice
have a larger hippocampal granule cell layer and 15 per cent more granule
cell neurons in the dentate gyrus. 


'Course psychologists don't know about such differences in the 
brain or technical stuff like that.

-Stephen
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Stephen Black, Ph.D.                      tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470
Department of Psychology                  fax: (819) 822-9661
Bishop's University                    e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca
Lennoxville, Quebec                        
J1M 1Z7                    "I'm a scientist. Certainty is a big word for me".                     
Canada                            -from the movie "Volcano"                                        
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