Discuss “Research performed on mice to study plasticity”

A mouse’s whiskers can tell a lot about the human mind.

Alison Barth, an assistant professor of biological sciences and an affiliate of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), has been studying mouse whiskers to learn about the brain’s ability to generate new connections between neurons. This ability, called plasticity, is crucial to the repair of brain damage, and it has been of much interest in the field of medical science.

Barth believes that mechanisms of plasticity can provide information about one of the brain’s most fundamental abilities — learning.

Barth, graduate student Brett Benedetti, and colleague Stanislaw Glazewski from Keele University in the United Kingdom recently performed research showing the extent...