Router neurons found, appear to not be present in rodent brains. May have many implications on human intelligence.

Okay, I am pretty disappointed in the response here. I saw this posted on a couple other subreddits first, and read the discussions there. Then I come here and don't see any useful scientific discussion. I see bitching about whether or not this is nootropics-related. We used to be better than this. We used to be the subreddit where I had the most confidence that the discussion would have some interesting or beneficial information being discussed in the comments. Now we are the one with the absolute shittiest response out of all the subs!

Who gives a fuck if this is not discussing a nootropic compound directly? This could be a huge discovery that leads to massive new discoveries down the line. This is a new type of GABAergic cell type that has never been defined before! It's one that is not found in rats, which has implications for the accuracy of animal models; especially when studying GABAergic compounds. It also has much greater implications to our understanding of pyramidal neurons and how they communicate with each other.

Here is the full study: Transcriptomic and morphophysiological evidence for a specialized human cortical GABAergic cell type

It was actually ten different interneuron subtypes that they are grouping together as one type, called rosehip cells. This is due to the shape of their axon terminals resembling a rosehip. They are located on cortical pyramidal neurons. Pyramidal neurons are a big target for the understanding of cognition and neuroplasticity; you know, the shit we are all interested here. Anyone that is actually interested in furthering our understanding of human cognition should be excited about this. If you're not, I would seriously question whether this subreddit is what you are looking for...

So what could these rosehip cells be doing in the brain? Well the study states that: "rosehip interneurons perform segment-specific regulation of action potential backpropagation to apical dendritic tufts of pyramidal cells." So it appears these rosehip cells are modulating/suppressing the Ca2+ signals of the pyramidal neurons next to them. Thus, they show that the primary local inputs to the rosehips cells appear to be predominantly GABAergic. They say:

Rosehip cells (RCs) may be of particular importance in compartmental control of backpropagating action potentials and their pairing with incoming excitatory inputs. The uniquely small membrane capacitance (Cm) found in human pyramidal cells promotes backpropagation of action potentials and increases excitability in human dendrites relative to rodent dendrites having larger Cm. Action potentials backpropagate to distal dendrites of human pyramidal cells and can be attenuated by RC activation. Thus, RCs may provide the supplementary inhibitory control required to balance the potentially higher excitability in human dendrites and modulate interactions between long-range excitatory connections arriving to layer 1 and the backpropagating action potentials suggested to participate in interhemispheric modulation. The sharp resonance in the theta-range detected in individual RCs and its potential spread through gap junctions to a rosehip network could phase-selectively interact with long range inputs similarly to mechanisms suggested (for example) in oscillation dependent memory consolidation. The function of neuron types specific to the human circuit could be important in understanding pathological alterations of network functions.

So this is a new type of cell that seems to modulate the action potential of pyramidal cells via neural backpropagation. There are theories that neural backpropagation is a crucial mechanism to neuroplasticity and long term potentiation. They even state that these rosehips cells might also be leading to the triggering of excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) as well. This is a very interesting discovery, and one that is absolutely relevant to nootropics.