Songbirds Reveal the Dark Side of Making New Brain Cells as Adults

Every day the human body replaces billions of cells, flushing out the old and generating the new, healthy ones. The average lifespan of a red blood cell is just under four months, while skin cells last about a month and those in the intestinal lining exist for just a few days. This turnover is the default, but there’s one part of the body in which humans and other mammals don’t seem geared toward generating new cells: the brain.

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“The human and bird forebrains have different organization patterns…, so some caution is called for in extending parallels to the level of brain circuits and cells,” says Eliot Brenowitz, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the new study.

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