This could significantly enhance our present understanding of the human and animal brain. In their experiments, Hedrick set out to better understand how neurons organize the thousands of inputs they receive from the environment and how this arrangement evolves during learning. 'In addition to the technical challenge of finding the same individual synapses in the brain of a living, behaving animal over many days while it learns, understanding how these changes occurred would require the fusion of several cutting edge (and challenging) approaches.' 'We reasoned that new synapses formed during learning might follow the clustering rules of their parent neurons, but we also knew that explaining how such organization is conducted would be a very difficult path,' Hedrick explained. In their paper, the researchers investigated this hypothesis further. These observations suggest that some 'active bundling' of information can occur at the single-neuron level. Many past studies examining individual synapses in the brain of living animals showed that neurons in the brain tend to organize similar information into 'clusters,' which are located along their branch-like dendrites. Hedrick and his colleagues set out to better understand the ways in which neurons in the brain use synapses to learn. 'But how do the neurons 'know' the appropriate connections to be made? And how do these changes happen without just 'confusing' a neuron, which already has thousands of such synapses?' Hedrick, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. 'We've known for a long time that, when an animal learns, new connections-or synapses-form between neurons in the brain,' Nathan G. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that the formation of new spines during learning could in fact be guided by the potentiation of some functionally divided, pre-existing spines. Researchers at University of California, San Diego have recently carried out a study investigating how learning affects the genesis and development of dendritic spines in more depth. While this finding is widely documented, the functions of these newly formed, learning-related dendritic spines is still poorly understood. Neuroscience studies showed that learning ultimately leads to the formation of new dendritic spines, small protrusions emerging from a neuron's dendrites (i.e., complex, branch-shaped extensions of cells).

Neuron dendrite development