Wrap It Up: Experience-dependent and developmental myelin growth in the human brain

Talk from Marieke Grotheer, Philipps University, Marburg
Abstract:
Humans start life fully dependent on the care of others, yet we go on to acquire skills no other species is capable of. What is the biological basis of this remarkable plasticity? One candidate is myelin, a fatty substance that wraps around nerve fibers thereby insolating them and promoting synchronized communication across the brain. Animal studies suggest a critical role of myelin in learning and brain plasticity, while post-mortem work has shown significantly protracted myelin development in humans. In this talk, I will present three studies that explore the role of myelin in human learning and its changes during human infant development in vivo. Across these studies, we employed a multimodal approach that combined functional, diffusion-weighted, and novel quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to explore changes in myelin within and across individuals as well as between distinct brain networks. I will end by briefly outlining my future directions probing interactions between developmental and learning-related changes in myelin.​