Structural plasticity of dendrites

Many lines of research have demonstrated structural plasticity of dendrites in the mammalian brain. Historically, the concept of structural plasticity has been incorporated into theories of learning in which structural changes in synaptic connections between neurons are suggested to underlie longterm information storage. However, the fact that circuits encoding learned information are likely to be distributed within and between brain regions, combined with the inability to identify individual cells and synapses involved in learning, makes it difficult to test this hypothesis directly. Even so, a number of experiments have demonstrated consistent experience- or learning-dependent structural changes in dendrites and synapses of cortical structures.