Discover Magazine has an excellent Carl Zimmer article on glial cells. They make up the majority of the brain's volume but they get relatively little attention from the neuroscience community who would rather focus on the seemingly more lively neurons.
There's a traditional format for these stories, that says that we used to think that glial cells were just 'scaffolding' for the brain that gave protected padding for the neurons, but now we are on the verge of a breakthrough in understanding what they do.
Here's one from New Scientist in 1994, and a pdf of another from Scientific American in 2004.
One difficulty has been integrating the action of glial cells into the popular cognitive model of the brain that suggests that it works as an information processing device.
While there have be...
↧