The plastic spinal cord

You can’t teach an old spinal cord new tricks, or something like that. Up until recently (like the last ten or fifteen years), we had thought that the spinal cord was a fixed thing. It was the information highway of the body and its primary role was to receive, sort, and send information from the brain to the body and vice versa. That’s (thankfully) not the case. The truth, or at least something closer to the truth, is that the spinal cord is a lot like the brain. It can learn, think, and even act independently of the brain.

September 9, 2021 | Categories: 365 Days of Academia - Year three, My Research | Tags: academia, Education, neuroengineering, neurology, neuroscience, PhD, research, school, SciComm, science, spinal cord, spine | Leave a comment