Spalding, Frisn, and colleagues then created a mathematical model estimating, bas ed on those ratios, the rate of cellular

turnover within the hippocampal neurons . More than a third of hippocampal neurons were regularly replaced, with roughly 1400 new neurons added each day during adulthood, they report online today in C ell. Some cells are dying, some are being replaced, Spaulding says. There is a cons tant flux of life and death. This is a spectacular independent confirmation of the 1998 study suggesting that n ew neurons are born during adulthood in the dentate gyrus, writes Gerd Kemperman n, a neuroscientist at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Dresd en, in an e-mail. It will likely settle the case. Kempermann says that his own and other s studies in mice indicate that fresh adult neurons have a specific function in the hippocampus for example, in helping the b rain distinguish between things that belong to the same category, or comparing n ew information to what it has already learned from experience. The ability to di stinguish between the Beatles and Rolling Stones, yet still identify both as rock bands, is one example of this type of task in humans, Frisn says. There is another possibility, however: Our ability to replace hippocampal neuron s could be an evolutionary vestige that is not all that important today, Rakic s ays. He argues that human survival may have depended not so much on our ability to produce new neurons, but on our ability to keep old ones in order to accumula te memories over the entire lifespan. Compared with fishes, frogs, reptiles, and birds, some of which can regrow entire brain structures, he says, it is interest ing that neuronal turnover in humans is limited to a single population of neuron s inu only one relatively small structure, and it is worthwhile to examine why i t persists.