Seeing a brain in the making
By A brain isn’t born fully organized. It builds its abilities through experience, making physical connections between neurons and organizing circuits to store and retrieve information in milliseconds for years afterwards.
Now that process has been caught in the act for the first time by a Duke University research team that watched a naïve brain organize itself to interpret images of motion.
“This is the first time that anyone has been able to watch as visual experience selectively shapes the functional properties of individual neurons,” said David Fitzpatrick, professor of neurobiology and director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. “These results emphasize just how important experience is for the early development of brain circuits.”
The group’s findings appear online Oct. 22 in the journal Nature.
Using an advanced imaging system that can see changes in calcium levels within individual neurons as an indication of electrical activity, the team has been able to see inside the brain of a one-month old ferret as it opened its eyes for the first time and learned how to interpret moving images.
They watched the brain learning how to see. As a ferret learned to discriminate one pattern of motion from another over the course of a few hours, the researchers could see large numbers of individual neurons in the visual cortex develop specific responses and become organized into functional assemblies called cortical columns. Additional experiments confirmed that the changes were dependent on the neurons being activated by the animal’s experience with moving visual images.
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