“It’s a very surprising result,” says Cameron, who works at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Rats that couldn’t make new neurons seemed to have trouble shifting their attention from one task to another, the researchers concluded.Īging humans, in whom neurogenesis is thought to decline, often have trouble remembering details that distinguish similar experiences. When the team ran the experiment without the water bottle, both sets of rats looked around right away to figure out where the sound was coming from. When the animals heard the noise, those that could make new hippocampal neurons immediately stopped slurping water and looked around, but the animals lacking hippocampal neurogenesis kept drinking. The team did this repeatedly with regular rats and with animals that were genetically altered so that they couldn’t make new neurons in their hippocampuses, a brain region involved in learning and memory. They waited until the rat started drinking and then made a startling noise to see how the animal would respond. She and her colleagues put an adult rat in the middle of a plastic box with a water bottle at one end. In the spring of 2019, neuroscientist Heather Cameron set up a simple experiment.
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