The life of the brain: The promise of restoration

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Thestar.com

Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
DALLAS—Dr. Andrew Pieper isn't sure how many hours he spent in room K3.406, a windowless space not much bigger than a broom closet, except that it all amounted to “quite a lot of time.”

This, it turns out, translates into many visits per week over the course of three years, enough to peer through a microscope at roughly 27,000 very thin sections of the brains of lab mice.

Or, to be precise, the so-called dentate gyrus in the hippocampus region of their brains.

The hippocampus is associated with memory, and the dentate gyrus is one part of the brain that generates new neurons, or nerve cells — the little building blocks that get wired into the mind's complicated circuitry.

Pieper, a biochemist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, had the “very tedious” task of detecting those new neurons, employing a series of antibodies to help amplify their telltale signal.

He found a great many nascent neurons, and this is very good news.

Until the 1960s, the received wisdom was more next time on dementia views about The life of the brain: The promise of restoration