RESHARED POST FROM KIKI SANFORD

h/t +Rebecca Spizzirri
Kiki Sanford originally shared this post:

Repetitive motor learning drives synaptic spine formation in a matter of days.

“With their microscope, Zuo and her colleagues often observed one spine pop out of a dendrite on the first day of training and another spine pop up near it a few days later. In more than half the clusters, the first spine grew on the first training day and the second joined it by the fourth, and nearly all of the clusters in all the learning mice grew between the first and fourth days. These observations suggest that the clusters are one example of how practice physically manifests itself in the brain. The findings appear in the March issue of Nature.”

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/16/spine-tuning-finding-physical-evidence-of-how-practice-rewires-the-brain/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22343892
Spine Tuning: Finding Physical Evidence of How Practice Rewires the Brain | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

In kindergarten, several of my friends and I were very serious about learning to tie our shoes. I remember sitting on the edge of the playground, …