Category: Neuroscience

Both our genetics and the circumstances of our lives influence the exact shape that our brains form.

Just like fingerprints, the anatomy of everyone’s brain is unique.

Both our genetics and the circumstances of our lives influence the exact shape that our brains form.

Our brains change under the influence of what we do.

For example, the brains of musicians and golfers have particular anatomical characteristics that reflect what they do.

However, even relatively short-term activities leave their mark on our brains.

For example, keeping one arm still for two weeks causes a thinning in the areas of the brain that control it.

Professor Lutz Jäncke, who led the study, said:

“We suspected that those experiences having an effect on the brain interact with the genetic make-up so that over the course of years every person develops a completely individual brain anatomy.”

For their study, the researchers scanned the brains of almost 200 healthy older people three times over two years.

Each one had characteristics that allowed the scientists to identify it with 90% accuracy just from the scan.

Professor Jäncke said:

“With our study we were able to confirm that the structure of people’s brains is very individual.

The combination of genetic and non-genetic influences clearly affects not only the functioning of the brain, but also its anatomy.”

Although identifying people by their brains on a routine basis is not practical, it does show how far the technology has come, said Professor Jäncke:

“Just 30 years ago we thought that the human brain had few or no individual characteristics.

Personal identification through brain anatomical characteristics was unimaginable.”

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Valizadeh et al., 2018).

Even the oldest brains are still producing new neurons.

Healthy older men and women grow as many new brain cells as younger people.

It had been thought for a long time that older people cannot grow new brain cells.

However, research is finding that older people can remain more cognitively and emotionally intact than previously thought.

Dr Maura Boldrini, who led the study, explained the results:

“We found that older people have similar ability to make thousands of hippocampal new neurons from progenitor cells as younger people do.

We also found equivalent volumes of the hippocampus (a brain structure used for emotion and cognition) across ages.

Nevertheless, older individuals had less vascularization and maybe less ability of new neurons to make connections.”

For the study, the brains of 28 people who had died suddenly were examined for evidence of new brain cells.

The results showed that even the oldest brains (79 years-old) were still producing new neurons.

The cognitive decline some experience with age could be down to worse connectivity between neurons and a smaller pool of neural stem cells.

Dr Boldrini said:

“It is possible that ongoing hippocampal neurogenesis sustains human-specific cognitive function throughout life and that declines may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience.”

The study was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell (Boldrini et al., 2018).