An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: Neurologists thought that your brain was basically set once you hit early childhood, but researchers from Stanford have discovered one part that keeps growing. Using new MRI imaging techniques, they found that the "fusiform gyrus," which is mostly responsible for recognizing human faces, keeps expanding well after other regions have stopped. The research could lead to more sophisticated cellular analysis of the brain and help patients with a disorder called "facial blindness." Normally, our brain actually loses neurons between early childhood and puberty in a process called "pruning." That applies to visual parts of the brain that identify things like cityscape or hallways, but not faces. The researchers used two different MRI machines to scan both brain activity and density in two different parts of the brain: the region responsible for identifying faces, and an area used for other types of visual recognition. They then compared those structures in the brains of children (aged five to 12) to adults between 22 to 28. It turned out that adults had thicker fusiform gyrus regions than kids, different levels of proteins and cells and more activity. By contrast, the other visual regions showed lower levels of development.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;"
a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Brain+Region+That+Recognizes+Faces+Keeps+Growing+in+Adulthood%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2i0Xqdj"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a
a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F01%2F06%2F1731212%2Fbrain-region-that-recognizes-faces-keeps-growing-in-adulthood%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a
a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/06/1731212/brain-region-that-recognizes-faces-keeps-growing-in-adulthood?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a
/div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/06/1731212/brain-region-that-recognizes-faces-keeps-growing-in-adulthood?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/NaIXLo0B854" height="1" width="1" alt=""/
