Learning rewires the same brain cell two different ways at once, a Nature Communications study finds

How does a memory settle into the brain without erasing everything else? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, working with colleagues in Bielefeld and Zurich, watched individual nerve cells in mice as they learned — and found something elegant. The braking connections (inhibitory synapses) that calm a neuron reorganize quickly at the branches where signals arrive, yet stay stable at the spot where the cell's own signal begins. In plain terms: the brain keeps re-tuning what a cell listens to, while protecting how it speaks. The work, published in Nature Communications, gives future experiments precise places to look for how learning — and its disorders — really work.

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