Mice Get Smarter After Scientists Inject Them With Human Brain Cells
When you think of a brain, you might imagine a flashing chain of neurons beaming messages to one another. But a new paper suggests that’s not the whole story, and they found this out by PUTTING HUMAN BRAIN CELLS IN MICE AND MAKING THEM SMARTER.
The non-neural brain cells they used are known as “glia”–like the “glue” of the system, although they’re also neural protectors and janitors–and they’ve been seen for awhile as supporting actors in the brain game. But the scientists involved in the experiment wanted to test for their importance to information processing. So, the team of researchers led by Steven Goldman and neurobiologist Maiken Nedergaard got to work.