Neuron Lifespan quotes and research

With neurons, nature developed biological immortality at the cellular level, but the animals needed to die to make way for the new generations, to allow for increased evolvability, or evolution rate, of the species.   Even in lowly rodents the neurons are capable of vastly outliving these short lived mammals.

“Neurons do not have a fixed lifespan,” says Magrassi. “They may survive forever. It’s the body that contains them that die. If you put them in a longer-living body, they survive as long as the new body allows them to. It increases our hope that extending lifespan will not necessarily result in brain depleted of neurons.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neurons-could-outlive-the-bodies-that-contain-them

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1217505110

Neuron Brain Articles

"Another consequence of a seemingly constant metabolic cost per neuron across species is that the total metabolic cost of ro- dent and primate brains, and of the human brain, is a simple, linear function of their total number of neurons..."

"Contrary to expectations, dividing total glucose use per minute in the cerebral cortex or whole brain (69) by the number of brain neurons revealed a remarkably constant average glucose use per neuron across the mouse, rat, squirrel, monkey, baboon, and human, with no significant relationship to neuronal density and, therefore, to average neuronal size (70). This is in contrast to the decreasing average metabolic cost of other cell types in mammalian bodies with increasing cell size (71–73), with the single possible exception of muscle fibers (74). The higher levels of expression of genes related to metabolism in human brains compared with chimpanzee and monkey brains (75, 76) might therefore be related not to an actual increase in metabolism per cell but to the maintenance of average neuronal metabolism in the face of decreasing metabolism in other cell types in the body."-link

Articles and video regarding metabolic costs of neurons,number of neurons in the brain, and other interesting brain related information.