When the brain's primary "learning center" is
damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function,
say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of
the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways — often far from the
damaged site.
The research, conducted by UCLA's Michael Fanselow and
Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the
neuroscience research program at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research,
appears this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.