成年后发芽的大多数神经元似乎在海马中，海马是一种参与学习和记忆的结构。但是它们很少存活超过几个星期。普林斯顿大学的神经科学家伊丽莎白·古尔德（Elizabeth Gould）说：“我们认为他们可能会死掉，因为他们被剥夺了某种投入。”由于地理位置的缘故，古尔德和她的同事们怀疑学习本身可以增强新神经元的存活，只有海马参与的工作才能达到目的。Most neurons sprouting in adulthood seem to be in the hippocampus, a structure involved in learning and memory. But they rarely survive more than a few weeks. “We thought they were possibly dying because they were deprived of some sort of input,” says Elizabeth Gould, a neuroscientist at Princeton. Because of the location, Gould and her colleagues suspect that learning itself might bolster the new neurons’ survival, and that only tasks involving the hippocampus would do the trick.