Inside your head, another brain is hiding in plain sight – one that responds to your cognitive needs and self-heals. It's time to make the most of your myelin
RECENTLY, my friend's cable TV went out. She fiddled with the box: resetting, unplugging and re-plugging. When that failed, she called the cable company. They examined things at their end – and came up short. Frustrated, she retreated to another room, where she discovered her cat had ripped apart a piece of the wire. It wasn't the ends that needed fixing; it was the part in the middle.
A similar revelation is under way in neuroscience. For years, changes in the brain – whether from learning to ride a bike, taking a Prozac, or sinking into Alzheimer's disease – have been attributed to the activity of neurons and the small chemical junctions between them, called synapses. Targeting synapses is like fiddling ...
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