Brain Cells Stop Growing When We Reach Adulthood
In the past, scientists believed that brain cells stopped growing once we became adults, but new studies have shown this to be false. The study, which was undertaken by researchers from New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, hoped to reach a definitive answer to the hotly debated topic of whether human brains grow new cells.
Scientists assumed that the answer was “no”–that old age significantly slows down neurogenesis in primates’ and rodents’ brains. However, this was only because previous research had been inconclusive at best due to the difficulty of scanning the hippocampus accurately. But upon examining autopsied brains of people aged 14-79, they found that even older individuals were still forming thousands of new brain cells.