Why can’t neurons regenerate in the brain?
In: Biology
Because people with this brain mutation, if it ever occurred, were not more fit for the environment than current humans. Many unintended consequences might occur, and the effects of generating new neurons might not be different from schizophrenia.
Mainly because the environment they’re in prevents healing from occurring. There are a lot of inhibitory molecules and systems in place to actively work against substantial regeneration of the CNS neurons.
We don’t know exactly why this is, although it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. The brain is incredibly, unimaginably complex. You’re talking billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them, forming vast and intricate circuits all over the brain.
Even our skin doesn’t always heal perfectly (scars) so it’s easy to imagine catastrophically lethal effects of the healing process going awry in such a delicate organ.
In evolutionary terms, it’s a tradeoff in terms of evolutionary fitness- our brain can’t regenerate, but in some cases it can reorganize itself and recover from an injury over time. So if we survived the initial injury, we’d still have a good chance of passing on our genes.
In this scenario, there’s no pressure to develop a neural regeneration system- humans aren’t dying in great enough numbers from head injuries to put selection pressure on the whole species.
they actually can if you put stem cells there, at least i know that was seen in mice brains but the neurons aren’t the memory
how memory works isn’t entirely cleared but in theory it’s like a signal with a spezific pattern for a spezific thing (=object, sound, taste, etc.) the more often you have that impression the easier it is to recall the signal pattern but thats lost if you just implant new braincells
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