Newborn neurons serve as means to fine-tune brain with changing environment

A new study has revealed that newborn neurons in the adult brain may help animals and humans to adapt to the changing environment.

The discovery that the human brain continues to produce new neurons in adulthood challenged a major dogma in the field of neuroscience, but the role of these neurons in behavior and cognition is still not clear.

In a review article, Maya Opendak and Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University synthesize the vast literature on this topic, reviewing environmental factors that influence the birth of new neurons in the adult hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays an important role in memory and learning.

The authors discussed how the birth of such neurons might help animals and humans adapt to their current environment and circumstances in a complex and changing world. They advocated for testing these ideas using naturalistic designs, such as allowing laboratory rodents to live in more natural social burrow settings and observing how circumstances such as social status influence the rate at which new neurons are born.

Opendak said that in particular, seeking out rewarding experiences or avoiding stressful experiences might help each individual optimize his or her own brain; however, more naturalistic experimental conditions might be a necessary step toward understanding the adaptive significance of neurons born in the adult brain.

The birth of new neurons in adulthood might have important behavioral and cognitive consequences. Stress-induced suppression of adult neurogenesis has been associated with impaired performance on hippocampus-dependent cognitive tasks, such as spatial navigation learning and object memory.

Stressful experiences have also been shown to increase anxiety-like behaviors that are associated with the hippocampus. In contrast, rewarding experiences are associated with reduced anxiety-like behavior and improved performance on cognitive tasks involving the hippocampus.

Although scientists generally agree that our day-to-day actions change our brains even in adulthood, there was some disagreement on the adaptive significance of new neurons. For instance, the literature presents mixed findings on whether new neurons generated under a specific experimental condition are geared toward the recognition of that particular experience or if they provide a more naive pool of new neurons that enable environmental adaptation in the future.

Gould and her collaborators recently proposed that stress-induced decreases in new neuron formation might improve the chances of survival by increasing anxiety and inhibiting exploration, thereby prioritizing safety and avoidant behavior at the expense of performing optimally on cognitive tasks.

On the other hand, reward-induced increases in new neuron number might reduce anxiety and facilitate exploration and learning, leading to greater reproductive success.

However, when aversive experiences far outnumber rewarding ones in both quantity and intensity, the system may reach a breaking point and produce a maladaptive outcome.

For example, repeated stress produces continued reduction in the birth of new neurons, and ultimately the emergence of heightened anxiety and depressive-like symptoms.

The study is published in Cell Press.