Larry Sherman
speaker
178 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Larry Sherman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So myelin
is this substance that kind of insulates, wraps around the wiry parts of nerve cells.
And what it does is it actually increases the speed at which nerve impulses travel through those wires.
I always like to tell people if you have myelin on a nerve cell, it's like driving on the Autobahn in Germany at midnight where there's no speed limit.
You could be going 200 miles an hour.
and nobody's going to stop you.
And if you lose myelin, it's like driving on your favorite freeway at rush hour in a big city.
Here in Portland, it would be I-5 at the 84 interchange, where you're lucky to be going two miles an hour.
And so that's really the difference between having myelin and not having myelin.
And it's so important for parts of our brain to communicate very quickly with each other to make everything work.
And so losing that is bad.
And actually, my lab studies multiple sclerosis.
That's a disease where
Myelin gets stripped off of these fibers of these nerve cells.
But just developing new myelin means you can have faster communication between different areas of the brain that will allow you to do lots of different things.
And then the third thing is something that was science fiction when I was in school.
It turns out we have this process where new neurons, nerve cells are made when we learn new things and we push ourselves to really learn something new.
It's a process called neurogenesis.
And it was considered dogma when I was in school that you're born with a certain number of neurons, and it's all downhill from there.
And there are certainly mornings I feel that way.
Showing 121–140 of 178 · page 7 of 9
← Previous
Next →