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LiveScience
LiveScience
Manuela Callari

UNCOVERED: Star shaped brain cells may underpin the brain s massive memory storage - The Untold Story

A microscope image showing a star-shaped cell with many long arms reaching to other cells.

For decades, scientists believed neurons were the brain's sole architects of thought and memory — but now, new research suggests that another, often-overlooked type of brain cell may play a more central role in memory than previously thought.

The study, published in May in the journal PNAS, proposes that these other brain cells, called astrocytes, could be responsible for the brain's impressive memory-storage capacity through a newly discovered kind of network architecture.

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