“There is a time in early development across mammalian species when the brain does most of its wiring, affected largely by the environment in which the animal is being raised. This study demonstrated that during this period, neurons are constantly "self-tuning" to adjust for changes in environmental inputs, says postdoctoral fellow Keith Hengen, the paper's first author….
"If something is disturbed during that critical period of early childhood development, functioning neurons can self-adjust and return to their set-point average firing rate," Hengen says....
""If we can figure out how these set points are built, we may be able to adjust them and bring the brains of people suffering from such disorders back into balance," Turrigiano says."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-brain-neural-thermostat.html
Hengen, et al. (2013). "Firing Rate Homeostasis in Visual Cortex of Freely Behaving Rodents."
Neuron. Abstract.
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