Business of Life

The Brain is always giving birth unless stressed or depressed

It used to be the accepted scientific wisdom that we are born with all the brain cells we will ever have or need. Elizabeth Gould is the scientist who started a new field - neurogenesis - by proving that human brains continually create new brain cells.

Her research is explored in a well-written, accessible article in Seed magazine by Jonah Lehrer called The Reinvention of the Self.

The brain, Elizabeth Gould had now firmly established, is always giving birth. The self is continually reinventing itself.
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Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured.

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance.
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Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.”

On the other hand, enriched animal environments—enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat—lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.

I would never have stumbled across it had it not been for Ambivablog and her post Stress and Depression Make You Stupid.

But it isn't just drugs that can reverse the long-term brain-stunting effects of deprivation and stress. An enriched and stimulating environment can coax the brain to begin to flourish and recreate itself again. "On a cellular level, the scars of stress can literally be healed by learning new things."

(T.H. White, in The Once and Future King, wrote, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.")

What exciting research.