Howard Gardner had some fascinating comments in his original version of Frames of Mind suggesting that different "intelligences," as he termed them, may have different patterns of plasticity over the lifespan. This newly reported research suggests a mechanism by which some regions of the brain might be better able to make new connections late in life than others.
"In the current study, they show that the capacity of interneurons to remodel is not predetermined by genetic lineage, but imposed by the circuitry within the layers of the cortex itself."
That was the most interesting sentence in there, imo. I suspect that just as the "Queen Bee" in a colony doesn't tell the bees what to do, there is no "Master Neuron" that tells all the neurons how to wire themselves. If that is the case, then I'm guessing there might be a decentralized system/algorithm that the neurons relies upon to regulate its own networking and growth.
Whatever that might be would not only be interesting to study, but also interesting to apply to say...networking home appliances.
