Their studies show that rewiring of the brain involves the
formation and elimination of synapses, the connections between
neurons. The technique offers a new way to examine how learning
can spur changes in the organization of neuronal connections in
the brain. The researchers, postdoctoral fellow Josh
Trachtenberg, graduate student Brian Chen and Karel Svoboda, a
Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory, published their findings in the December
19/26, 2002,issue of the journal Nature. According to Svoboda,
researchers had previously shown that the adult brain has a
capacity to reorganize in response to new experience. However,
it is not clear how this reorganization might occur. Svoboda and
his colleagues wanted to see whether learning could induce
restructuring of the neural circuitry in the brain that could
not be picked up with conventional techniques. To study those
kinds of changes in a living animal, Svoboda and his colleagues
started with transgenic mice that were e