U. of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
AScribe Newswire - December 08, 1999
Brains of Those in High-Skilled Work Found to Have More Synapses, Key
Neurological Sites for Storing Information
CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Dec. 8 (AScribe News) --
Education not only makes a person smarter, it may generate a specific type of
synapse in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, Illinois and Russian
neuroscientists say.
"There clearly were more synapses found
in subjects with intellectually skilled professions, such as engineering or
teaching," said James E. Black, who is part of a team examining post-mortem
brain tissue at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced
Science and Technology. "With our approach, however, we can't determine if
extra professional experience actually caused new synapses to form, or if people
with more synapses tended to choose challenging professions."
The team's preliminary findings were presented
in late October at the 29th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in
Miami.
Black and his Russian colleagues used an
electron microscope that allowed for a systematic count of brain cells (neurons)
and synapses (the connections between neurons) in 16 healthy people. Based on
family interviews, the subjects were then divided by their profession and amount
of education, with a high-level category corresponding to skilled occupations
requiring more than a high school degree.
The researchers examined tissue from the
uppermost layers of the prefrontal cortex - an area of the brain used in complex
reasoning - and counted two different types of synapses. They also examined the
same types of synapses in occipital cortex, an area involved in simple visual
perception.
Subjects with more professional training had
17 percent more synapses for each neuron than did their less educated
counterparts. Synapse formation is thought to be a means of storing the
information obtained through experience.
"The animal literature strongly indicates
that experience can drive the formation of new synapses," said Black, a
physician and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and a professor of neuroscience and psychology on the Urbana-Champaign
campus.
A study by Arnold Scheibel of UCLA found a
correlation between education and neuron branching in another brain region, a
finding that would support the synapse data.
"Because humans learn an enormous amount
of information during development, there is good reason to think that they store
this information in the form of new synaptic connections between neurons,"
Black said.
No significant differences were found in the
subjects' occipital cortex or in the numbers of the second type of synapse,
suggesting that professional training may affect only certain types of synapses.
The study is part of a larger project
examining brain changes that may be related to schizophrenia, which affects
synapses in the prefrontal cortex. While schizophrenia can greatly interfere
with a person's quality of life, Black said, new medications offer a good
possibility of recovery.
The research team includes Dr. Natalya Uranova
and colleagues in Moscow, and Black, Anna Klintsova and William T. Greenough of
the U. of I.
AScribe - The Public Interest Newswire /
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