Scientists have long known that the brain’s visual system isn’t fully hardwired from the start — it becomes refined by what babies see — but the authors of a new MIT study still weren’t prepared for the degree of rewiring they observed when they took a first-ever look at the process in mice as it happened in real-time.As the researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory tracked hundreds of “spine” structures housing individual network connections, or “synapses,” on the dendrite branches of neurons in the visual cortex over…
