“Don’t you know drinking kills brain cells?!” Every so often I catch myself saying this phrase or I hear someone repeating the phrase back to me. The brain on average has about 100 billion neurons; I figure I can let a few go to waste right? I also can’t forget the infamous public service announcement of an egg cooking on a frying pan warning me that “this is my brain on drugs” or the fact that watching television will cause my brain to rot. My interest in neuroscience over my college years has made me aware of frightening degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. As a result I have made the matter of preserving my brain cells a top priority. After many classes and further research on how lifestyle choices can help to preserve those precious brain cells. I have tried my best to implement this advice into my life in the hope of warding off neurodegenerative diseases and improving my intellectual capacities. The best news I have heard this year is about how exercise actually promotes brain cell growth and I reasoned to myself the more the better. Adding a few extra neurons to my brain would definitely help me remember more, learn better and hold of any degeneration that is coming in the future. Since knowledge is power I actively seek out any new information whether in the news or in neuroscience classes about ways to improve my brain including ways of adding more neurons whether it is through eating certain foods or some kind of new mental exercise.
Ironically I stumbled upon an article that has flipped my rational upside-down. Seeking to learn more about the study presented in the article I stumbled upon the fact that almost all major media sources were talking about this exact study. What is the big news; well it appears that having more neurons is actually the opposite of what I want. A recent study has revealed that autistic children have larger and heavier brains as a result of having a lot more neurons than that of normal children. On average they have about 79% more neurons in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, one of the newest areas of our cortex that is important to our higher order functioning. The prefrontal cortex normally has 1.16 billion neurons on average, while autistic kids have 1.94 billion. Clearly the results are in, less is more. Previous studies have already established that the brains of people suffering from autism have larger and heavier brains, but it was unclear whether this extra mass was due to super-connectivity or an increase in the actual amount of neurons. This study has changed all of that as neurons from postmortem brain tissue were counted from 12 boys, 6 with autism and 6 without. All of this however, still fails to answer the question of what causes this mysterious disease called autism? NO, it is not vaccinations. The answer is still a subject of intensive research with the spotlight now on whether this increase in neurons is a result of an overproduction of neurons in the fetus or a failure in synaptic pruning. My guess on the subject is that for those with normal brains, our neural connections are far more important than the actual number of neurons that we have. This is why I feel our brain has 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion connections. Although we are far from uncovering the causalities of autism we can rest assure that we are on the right track, as for the rest of us we can no longer blame our bad grades on a loss of brain cells.
Article can be seen here: http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/autism/story/2011-11-08/Autistic-children-may-have-too-many-brain-cells-study-says/51128494/1
I completely agree that often times people that have fewer neurons have more effective processing brains, but this isn't specifically because of the fact that the brain has fewer numbers of neurons but because of the increased specialization in the brain, which results from the selective pruning of neurons. You cant necessarily say that based on pure numbers, by having fewer neurons you have a better functioning brain. Although on the surface this inference could seem logical, the increased functioning of the brain is due to the increased specialization, not the decreased numbers. The decreased numbers of neurons is simply a byproduct. One other question I would raise is, by saying less is in a sense better for functioning, how would you describe those situations where autistic individuals are considered to be very intelligent, for example in savant syndrom? If indeed there is a strict correlation between high functioning brains and lower numbers of neurons, would the high functioning, very intelligent autistic individuals be considered rarities that could be ignored as very uncommon exceptions, or can a broad relationship between the numbers of neurons and brain mass and the ability of the brain to function not actually be that simple to classify?
ReplyDeleteIt is important to remember that every individual’s brain is unique. Certain stimuli do not prompt the same pathways and connections to be activated in every person’s brain. For example, an architect might think of house when presented with HO_ _ _ while a farmer might think of a horse. These two words would activate very different connections for these two individuals as learned in class and from Buonomano. The growth and pruning of particular neurons as well as the number of neural connections for certain types of information are very individual-specific. This article says the number of neural connections in both normal and autistic brains is more critical to effective processing than the number of neurons in the brain. This could explain the difference between normal brains and autistics. Since autistics show an increased number of neurons in overall, they also would show an increased number of neurons and neuronal connections that have been programmed for one particular type of information and memory, thus explaining why they show a proficiency in memory for particular types of information over ‘normal’ individuals.
ReplyDeleteI would also be interested to know what the brains of an adult with autism look like. I think a major downfall of the study was that it only included 12 boys, between the ages of 2 and 16. That is an extremely specific sample, one that should not be considered characteristic for all autistics in general. After a lifetime of forming and losing connections the adult brain should look substantially different than the brain of a 16 year old.