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A new Pitt study has upended decades-old assumptions about brain plasticity
The findings by Oliver Schlüter, Yue Yang and team may have implications for learning, memory and mental health.
The findings, published in Science Advances, offer a deeper understanding of how the brain balances stability with flexibility, a process essential for learning, memory and mental health. Using a mouse model, the research team — led by Oliver Schlüter, associate professor of neuroscience in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences — discovered that the brain instead uses separate synaptic transmission sites to carry out regulation of these two types of activity, each with its own developmental timeline and regulatory rules. This caused spontaneous activity to increase, while evoked signals remained unchanged — strong evidence that the two types of transmission operate through functionally distinct synaptic sites.
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