STUDY The researchers found that there were actually 26 sizes of synapses and not three …
Not easy to imagine that the human brain has exceptional capabilities in memory when our daily life is filled with large and small oversights and other blunders.
However, the brain may actually present storage capacity tenfold larger than what the studies on the subject had shown so far. That is certainly the conclusion of neuroscientists from the Salk Institute in California (USA), who conducted and analyzed a 3D representation of a rat hippocampus, a brain area for capital memory.
Their work, published in the magazine eLife shows that certain neurons seem to send a double message and thus be accompanied by two synapses, necessary for the provision of information between neurons.
Initially mistaken for trouble, this specificity has allowed scientists to discover that there are actually 26 sizes of synapses and not three. And so seriously revise upwards the estimate of the total amount of information that these synapses can store.
Especially as regularly, “win or lose synapses size. They adapt to the signal they receive “, explains Tom Bartol of the Salk Institute. And thus make the brain more efficient than previously thought
Keywords:.
No comments:
Post a Comment