One of the 25 most influential articles of 2018

Prof. Ido Kanter's Research on the Brain Named One of the 25 Best of 2018

Medical Xpress, a web-based medical and health news service, has named research published earlier this year by Prof. Ido Kanter and a team of scientists from the Department of Physics and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center as one of the 25 Best of 2018.

In an article entitled "Best of Last Year – The top Medical Xpress articles of 2018", the editors wrote, "A team led by Ido Kanter from Bar-Ilan University reports evidence that the brain learns completely differently than we've assume since the 20th century. Since the 1940s, medical scientists have believed that the brain learns by modifying the strength of the synapse. In this new effort, the researchers found evidence of changes to the brain during learning in dendrites – the long arms of neurons. This finding suggests learning is more complicated in the brain than has been thought."

The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports in March 2018. "The newly discovered process of learning in the dendrites occurs at a much faster rate than in the old scenario suggesting that learning occurs solely in the synapses. In this new dendritic learning process, there are a few adaptive parameters per neuron, in comparison to thousands of tiny and sensitive ones in the synaptic learning scenario," said Prof. Kanter, whose research team includes Shira Sardi, Roni Vardi, Anton Sheinin, Amir Goldental and Herut Uzan, at the time. 

The new theory on brain learning contradicts the most common assumption in neuroscience, put forth in 1949 by Donald Hebb, whose pioneering work suggested that learning occurs in the brain by modifying the strength of the synapses, whereas neurons function as the computational elements in the brain. This remained the common assumption until Kanter's research was published earlier this year. Another important finding of the study is that weak synapses, previously assumed to be insignificant even though they comprise the majority of our brain, play an important role in the dynamics of our brain.  

Prof. Kanter's study is the only Israeli research appearing on Medical Xpress' list this year, which also singles out the World Health Organization and universities and research institutions in the United States, Italy, United Kingdom, China, South Africa, Germany, Canada and Norway. The research was selected from among thousands published throughout the past year.

Medical Xpress is part of the Science X network and features comprehensive coverage in medical research and health news in many fields, including neuroscience.