Making old brains young

Flip of Single Molecular Switch Makes Old Brain Young

Short form: Around the time of adolescence, the brain goes from constantly rewiring itself – which makes learning easy – to a more fixed configuration.Yale researchers figured out the gene sequence responsible for this in mice, and tinkered, resetting mouse brains back to the childlike-flexibility. An advantage of this is that child brains are more easily repaired than adult brains… getting bashed on the noggin or having a stroke can be recovered from more quickly and completely if your brain is able to rewire itself easily.

If you could reset an adult human brain to the easily rewired configuration, it *might* make said human extremely smart and innovative. Or it might make said human a psychopath, a schizophrenic, or perhaps some wholly new form of disconnected-from-reality-crazy. Who knows. But it’s worth an experiment or three. If the same process that works on mice can work on humans, an obvious set of experiments is to try it out on  people who have just had massive strokes or other brain damage. Perhaps try it out on people with bad aneurisms or rain tumors, people whose brains haven’t been damaged *yet,* but who know that it’s only a matter of time.

I suspect chances are good that a combo of brain damage and increased brain plasticity might result in the patient eventually becoming an entirely different person… the memories might be there, but the personality has the potential to completely reprogram itself.