Gage’s theory is that in a natural setting, long-term fast walking would take the animal into a new, different environment that would require new learning, sparking what he calls “anticipatory proliferation.” “If we lived in this room only,” he told me, “and this was our entire experience, we would not need neurogenesis. We would know everything about this environment and could function with all the basic knowledge we have.” This theory, that novel environments may trigger neurogenesis, is consistent with Merzenich’s discovery that in order to keep the brain fit, we must learn something new,
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