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This sounds pretty gruesome — your brain starting to eat itself, like some sort of disease in a horror film. However, research recently published has shown that this process, which we have known about for a long time, is important in developing memory in the short term.
But let’s understand how the brain can eat itself in the first place. There are a number of ways the brain, or rather specific cells in the brain, and most of these are good for the brain, digest parts. Firstly, we know that as the brain develops in early childhood there is a key phase of so-called pruning. This is when the brain, or specifically a form of helping cells in the brain called glial cells, cut back connections in the brain. This helps make our brains more efficient and stabilises certain memories and functions.
There are also other processes, and these are often part of everyday cleaning processes whereby a type of glial cell will clear out toxins collected in the brain — and then there is a process whereby damaged cells are cleared out. If the brain does this overenthusiastically, for example after stroke, this can inhibit brain functions.
This we know, but we didn’t know how this works in a day-to-day basis and how this helps plasticity, our brain to develop and learn new things, and therefore memory.
