As we grow older, our brains reorganize themselves, pruning and streamlining nerve fiber linkages to reduce overall network connectivity while selectively preserving long-distance connections that are crucial to information integration.
Now, a team led by Newcastle University in the UK has found this brain streamlining starts earlier in girls, suggesting it may explain why they mature before boys in their teen years.
The researchers also suggest this gradual, selective reduction of connections may be the reason brain function does not deteriorate - it even improves - during network pruning.
One of the study leaders, Dr. Marcus Kaiser, reader in Neuroinformatics at Newcastle, says:
"Long-distance connections are difficult to establish and maintain but are crucial for fast and efficient processing."
Long-distance connections bring new information
To explain the value of the long-distance connection, Dr. Kaiser uses the idea of social networks:
"If you think about a social network, nearby friends might give you very similar information - you might hear the same news from different people. People from different cities or countries are more likely to give you novel information."
"In the same way, some information flow within a brain module might be redundant whereas information from other modules, say integrating the optical information about a face with the acoustic information of a voice, is vital in making sense of the outside world."
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