Environmental Change, the Stress Response, and Neurogenesis: Fig. 1

SYMPOSIUM Environmental Change, the Stress Response, and Neurogenesis

Synopsis Previous to the 1980’s, the prevailing neuroscience dogma held that no new neurons were produced in the brains of adult mammals. Now, we understand that the production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, is a common and plastic process in the adult brain. To date, however, researchers have not come to a unified understanding of the functional significance of neurogenesis. Several factors ...

Rate of environmental change determines stress response specificity.

Cells use general stress response pathways to activate diverse target genes in response to a variety of stresses. However, general stress responses coexist with more specific pathways that are activated by individual stresses, provoking the fundamental question of whether and how cells control the generality or specificity of their response to a particular stress. Here we address this issue usi...

Fig. 1

Automatic detection and response to environmental change

Robots typically have many sensors which are underutilized. This is usually because no simple mathematical models of the sensors have been developed or the sensors are too noisy to use techniques which require simple noise models. We propose to use these underutilized sensors to determine the state of the environment in which the robot is operating. Being able to identify the state of the envir...

Stress and adult neurogenesis.

Stress hormones have potent growth-inhibiting effects on a variety of peripheral tissues. Consistent with this general function, stress has been shown to inhibit cell proliferation and, ultimately, neurogenesis in the hippocampus. This effect appears to be common across mammalian species, life stages, and most types of stressors. Although some evidence points to a role for glucocorticoids in me...