What is the role of the enriched environment experiments with the mice?
One could think about neurogenesis as a static event. That is, that you have this added number of cells coming into the circuit and that affords an individual some function of which we don’t really know yet. We’ve now found that they are functional. What is the function that they have? One could theorize that they are continually added into the circuit. We had a surprise that occurred, ah, some five or six years ago where one of the fellows in my lab, Gerd Kemperman, was reading the old literature on environmental enrichment where they showed that there were changes in synapses, changes in transmitter release, changes in neurotransmitters, and he questioned whether or not the events of neurogenesis were modified by changes in environment, and really it was a wild shot. It was not something one could predict ahead of time, but the effect was quite robust. So if you take genetically identical, sex-matched to the same gender, same age adult mice and then split them into two environments,
