What Is the Brain's Future?

It's time for the human brain to look to the future, but what will that future be? There's a lot of updating going on already. The brain is making bigger news than genes, which wasn't so twenty years ago. The standard model of the brain was a stable, porrridgy gray mass that couldn't heal itself or even grow new brain cells. A standard way to warn about the damage done by alcohol was to point out how many million brain cells were killed off by heavy drinking, cells that would never be replaced. But this old brain model has proved to be either wrong or incomplete.

The latest model reverses most of the accepted beliefs from the past. We now see the brain as dynamic, not fixed. Its processes are so "soft-wired" that new pathways are formed by everyday behavior, habits, and conditioning. Stem cells exist in the brain, allowing for newborn neurons at every stage of life. And the injured brain can regenerate and heal itself, shifting a lost function to a new, undamaged area of itself. None of these things are disputed anymore. Everyone in the field is excited about the next big breakthroughs in neurology, whatever they may be.

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