I Think, Therefore I Am: Me and My Brain

"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 [blood vessel formation] and maybe less ability of new neurons to make connections."
"The exciting part is that the neurons are there throughout a lifetime. It seems that indeed humans are different from mice – where [neuron production] goes down with age really fast – and this could mean that we need these neurons for our complex learning abilities and cognitive behavioural responses to emotions."
"According to mice studies there are these pluripotent stem cells that are a pool of cells that don’t normally do anything, they are quiescent, and then they can undergo division [though some studies suggest we might be born with a finite pool of such ‘mother cells’. Those daughter cells are the ones that exponentially divide and make many more cells and differentiate towards becoming a neuron."
"We can still make enough neurons even with fewer left of these ‘mothers’ [even as people age and approach death]. Even though we make these new neurons, they might be less plastic, or maybe making fewer connections or migrating less."
Dr Maura Boldrini, research scientist, department of psychiatry, Columbia University, New York 

Neurons are required for learning and memory processes, and it was previously thought humans stopped producing them in their late teens. Photograph: iLexx/Getty Images/iStockphoto

"For now, we do not think this new study challenges what we have concluded from our own recently published observations: if neurogenesis continues in the adult human hippocampus, it is an extremely rare phenomenon."
"It boils down to interpretation of equivocal cells which we took extra steps to characterize extensively and showed not to be new neurons as they first appeared."
Dr Mercedes Paredes, University of California, San Francisco

"We know from work in animal models that adult born neurons are required for various learning and memory processes, and there is some evidence suggesting neurogenesis is disrupted in human psychiatric conditions."
"This is a promising area for potential treatments."
Dr Niels Haan, Cardiff University

Ah well, one scientist's !Eureka! finding is another scientist's variant interpretation, and so it is that Dr. Paredes who had published her own paper only a month before this latest one, concluded that indeed, no, adults do not develop new neurons and she is no more convinced with the publication of the paper heralding the new finding that contradicts hers, than she was when she reached her original conclusion. But this is typical in the scientific community; there are most often cliques and claques and scientists agree to disagree until such time as really, truly, conclusive, irrefutable evidence arises to silence critics.

This image shows what scientists say is a new neuron in the brain of an older human. A new study suggests that humans continue to make new neurons throughout their lives. (Columbia University Irving Medical Center)

This new finding, however, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell is being lauded as a landmark discovery. With the hope that as science delves further into the mysteries of the brain and finds greater understanding of its mysterious processes, other discoveries await that may have the potential to treat degenerative diseases like frontal lobe dementia and Alzheimer's. It has generally, up to the present however, been accepted among researchers that no new cells can be grown after childhood.

Which would explain were that to be the case, why it is that adults find it so much more difficult to learn new skills or master a new foreign language in comparison to the ease with which children manage both quite handily. Recent studies appear to point out that should specific brain zones be hyper-stimulated, cells could be persuaded to form anew. One study focused on black cab drivers in London undertaking to study Knowledge; a mental map of London's streets. They were in possession of an increased number of neurons in areas of the brain linked to navigation.

Which could conceivably be interpreted as the stimulation of some areas of the brain to form new neural pathways on a learning curve, rather than new brain cells, to aid in that navigation accomplishment. But now a study has found that new brain cells are continually being formed, including in elderly brains. Suggesting further that problems that arise with mental capacity and memory linked to old age do not represent a loss of neurons but instead a failure of cells to ably communicate with one another.

To accomplish the research leading to its remarkable conclusion, scientists studied the hippocampus in 28 previously healthy individuals, aged between fourteen to 79 who had suddenly died. They discovered that new cells were forming right up to the time of death -- including in the brains of the oldest among them.

Developing nerve cells, with the nuclei shown in yellow.

Credit: Torsten Wittmann, University of California, San Francisco

Clashing Heads, Crashing Brain

"I did a list from the five teams I played for. I have come up with 15 guys I played with or are part of Ottawa football alumni who have either died from or are suffering from degenerative brain disease -- Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's or CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy]."
"I define profound [incidents in head bashing] as sensing I was out of my own body. In each case, I played almost the entire game feeling as though I were floating above the field and watching myself down there, in slow motion."
Bob McKeown, former Ottawa Rough Riders lineman

Mr. McKeown played for the CFL (Canadian Football League) league between 1971 and 1975. The conditions under which he played as a lineman were not different then than they are now. Head bashing, concussions, repercussions and an unwillingness to withdraw from the game are now as they were then. Only back then the morbidity of the constant traumatic head injuries were an unknown. No one, it seems, even thought to consider the physical consequences of continuing head bashing.

Now, however, scientific enquiry is firm in its conclusion that concussion, brain trauma and degenerative brain disease result from the way that football is played, an energetic, violent exercise of the human body, treating the human cranium as though it were just a ball receiving rough treatment, and that whoever sustained an injury would simply "get over it". Likely the growing awareness of boxing's violent effect on the heads and brains of professional boxers led to the origins of the first awareness of the link between sustained head injury and brain deterioration.

Photos of a normal brain (top) compared with the brain of Greg Ploetz (bottom), who played defensive tackle for the Texas Longhorns and who suffered from severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  Boston University Photography

Back then, Bob McKeown, former Rough Riders lineman, just sucked it up like all his teammates. Now, he is an award-winning reporter for the CBC's Fifth Estate investigative journalism program. Back when he was a young footballer, he played in high school and that was his introduction to "profound" incidents that led to a succession of concussions. College (Yale) football continued the exposure and then finally, playing for the Canadian Football League.

He has not yet become aware of any brain disease symptoms in his own experience. But, hearing about the experiences later in life of all those he knew and played with, dying at an early age from progressive degenerative brain diseases, has convinced him that he would like his own brain to be studied after his death. He is very aware that back then, when he played football and suffered some of those physically devastating blows, playing the game through a fog of disorientation, he thought his playing was vastly improved during such episodes.

Research by brain scientists associated with Boston University representing the largest study of former football players ever to have been undertaken, revealed that almost all ex NFL players whose brains were examined indicated levels of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) present (110 out of 111 examined) ranging from mild to severe. That number included seven of eight former CFL players.

Two college football players collide head-first during a 2009 game. 

Donald Page/Southcreek Global/ZUMApress/Newscom

A previous study out of the Canadian Concussion Centre in Toronto indicated somewhat lower CTE rates to be present among the brains examined post-mortem. Irrespective of which the lead investigator of the Boston research, Dr. Ann McKee, concludes along with her scientific panel that no doubt whatever can exist any longer that there is a definite link between repeated blows to the human head and the eruption of brain disease in later life.

The National Football League in 2016 realized the futility of its denials of any such links. Which led them to make a $1-billion settlement with former players in hopes of compensating for issues relating to brain health. But while the NFL has made that admission and committed to a payout to those involved, the CFL has as yet done no such thing. Retired CFL players like their NHL counterparts filed a class-action damage suit, a claim on hold awaiting a jurisdictional decision.

Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Lamaar Thomas (center) is hit in the head by Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker Brandon Magee as cornerback Kip Edwards helps make the tackle a 2014 preseason game. Magee was penalized for the hit.

Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP