Book contents
- From Loss to Memory
- From Loss to Memory
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Counting Synapses
- 2 Discovering Synaptic Pruning
- 3 Else, Peter’s Mother
- 4 Richard, Peter’s Father, and Peter’s Uncle Fritz
- 5 Greiz: Kriegskinder (Children of War)
- 6 In Braubach, after the War
- 7 Arrival in America
- 8 Harvard Medical School
- 9 Understanding Sleep and Consciousness: Research at the National Institutes of Health
- 10 Entering the Cognitive Revolution: Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology
- 11 Physician First, Scientist Second?
- 12 Comparative Brain Regions and Synapse Formation
- 13 Stimulating Progress on Developmental Brain Disorders
- 14 Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Schizophrenia: A Role for Synaptic Pruning?
- 15 Early Childhood Education
- 16 Peter and Janellen’s Collaboration
- 17 Microglial Cells and the Mechanisms of Synaptic Pruning
- 18 Looking Forward: Being a Physician and a Scientist
- 19 Parkinson’s Disease and Berlin
- 20 Auf Deutsch: Back to German
- 21 Memories and Reflections at the End: A Return Trip to Greiz
- Glossary
- Index
- References
12 - Comparative Brain Regions and Synapse Formation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2023
- From Loss to Memory
- From Loss to Memory
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Counting Synapses
- 2 Discovering Synaptic Pruning
- 3 Else, Peter’s Mother
- 4 Richard, Peter’s Father, and Peter’s Uncle Fritz
- 5 Greiz: Kriegskinder (Children of War)
- 6 In Braubach, after the War
- 7 Arrival in America
- 8 Harvard Medical School
- 9 Understanding Sleep and Consciousness: Research at the National Institutes of Health
- 10 Entering the Cognitive Revolution: Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology
- 11 Physician First, Scientist Second?
- 12 Comparative Brain Regions and Synapse Formation
- 13 Stimulating Progress on Developmental Brain Disorders
- 14 Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Schizophrenia: A Role for Synaptic Pruning?
- 15 Early Childhood Education
- 16 Peter and Janellen’s Collaboration
- 17 Microglial Cells and the Mechanisms of Synaptic Pruning
- 18 Looking Forward: Being a Physician and a Scientist
- 19 Parkinson’s Disease and Berlin
- 20 Auf Deutsch: Back to German
- 21 Memories and Reflections at the End: A Return Trip to Greiz
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
As his former National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Irwin Feinberg put it, Peter’s research “took a 180-degree turn” after his move to the University of Chicago in 1974. Instead of focusing on the brains of patients with neurological deficits, he started to study the “gridwork” of healthy brains. As Peter said, “the findings in the normal population were more interesting than the abnormal population.” His landmark 1979 study published in Brain Research was unexpected [1]. The accepted thinking at that time was that brains actually get more connections as we learn and develop, but he found the opposite to be true. After a burst of new synapses form in the first year of life, unneeded connections are removed, or pruned. All scientific discoveries are incremental and build on the work of other scientists. But rarely, a scientific discovery can also present an entirely new way of thinking about a problem – and is truly a breakthrough. In a conversation in May 2022, Feinberg said about Peter’s work: “the idea of brain connections was not in the thinking in the 1980s. The skeptics were many.”
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- From Loss to MemoryBehind the Discovery of Synaptic Pruning, pp. 77 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023