Several lines of thought incorporate the importance of birth dates or birth months in determining fundamental traits of one’s personality. While some of these might be pseudoscientific in nature, neuroscientists at New York University have identified a similar concept in the hippocampi of mice. This brain region is associated with functions like learning, memory, and navigation. Specifically, the researchers identified that the birthdate of neurons in the hippocampus correlates to the function of those cells later on in their life. Therefore, neurons with the same birthday are more likely to form connections with the same cells, thus creating unique circuits.
The hippocampus is a seahorse-like structure in the deep brain that is responsible for memory and navigation functions.
Image Source: AFP / Stringer
In 2014, a Nobel Prize in Medicine was granted to Nordic and British scientists for their discovery of place and grid cells in the hippocampus. Since the discovery of place cells in the 1970s, much work has been done to further identify key features of their function. Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus that fire when an animal visits a certain location or “place” in their environment, and are thought to be important in developing internal maps of these exact environments within the brain. In the work described above, the authors identified that neurons with the same birthday are more likely to have overlapping place fields. This work plays a major role in parsing through the functional organization of neuronal circuits throughout the hippocampus and improves our understanding of how neurons in the hippocampus work. It appears that it’s not just neurons that “wire together,” “fire together;” but neurons that are born together, “wire and fire” together.
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