Zoltán Molnár, Professor of Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Oxford and Einstein Visiting Fellow, published a landmark collaborative review in Science together with his colleagues Patrick Kanold (Johns Hopkins University) and Heiko Luhmann (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz). In their studies on early brain development, they found that transient neurons match the spontaneous and sensory driven activities to shape cortical circuits. This shows that neuronal activity plays an important role much earlier than previously thought.
At birth, our brain is not a blank page. When a newborn child opens the eyes for the first time, the brain is already prepared to process this information. Although it takes months to reach the full capacity of vision, the same neuronal modules and activity patterns are - from the first days on - transiently present to generate an "operable" network in the outer mantle of our brain.
The publication by Molnár, Kanold and Luhmann gives a…
