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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 1042121" data-attributes="member: 317">Originally posted by BigFreekinGoblinoid: Well, its kinda hard to tell, considering that mice cannot take questionaires or give you much feedback, but the caloric restriction mice are having a considerably harder time learning a Morris water maze task.  Basically this entails a tub full of water with a platform just below the surface of the water.  With successive trials, when mice figure out where the platform is, their latency to find the platform decreases.  The caloric restriction mice don't seem to be finding it any faster (I'm on day 7 out of 10 on the trials), and their laterncies in some cases are growing as their weight continues to drop.  They seem to engage in a lot more random searching.This ties into brain activity in that neurogenesis occurs throughout the life of mammals in two areas of the brain: the lateral ventricles (whose neurons migrate into the olfactory bulbs), and the hippocampus (which is responsible for memory consolidation in large part).  In particular, the Morris water maze tests a hippocampal "spatial mapping system" mode of memory.  Pilot data I collected last summer suggests that cutting calories by 20% also causes a 20% reduction in neurogenesis in these areas (likely due to slowed mitotic cell division).  I wanted to see if there was a functional defecit caused by this neurogenesis, and it looks like there is right now, although all the stats haven't been done on the data to see if it is significant yet.How was that for long-winded and completely off topic? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />PS- feel free to quote that hellacious sentence I wrote if you want. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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