the adult brain does make new neurons

I first learned about this in the book Spark by J Ratey.
But this blog post gives a better history.
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_4.html#sapolsky
Well, my biggest change of mind came only a few years ago. It was the outcome of a painful journey of self-discovery, where my wife and children stood behind me and made it possible, where I struggled with all my soul, and all my heart and all my might. But that had to do with my realizing that Broadway musicals are not cultural travesties, so it's a little tangential here. Instead I'll focus on science.
 
I'm both a neurobiologist and a primatologist, and I've changed my mind about plenty of things in both of these realms. But the most fundamental change is one that transcends either of those disciplines — this was my realizing that the most interesting and important things in the life sciences are not going to be explained with sheer reductionism.

A specific change of mind concerned my work as a neurobiologist.

This came about 15 years ago, and it challenged neurobiological dogma that I had learned in pre-school, namely that the adult brain does not make new neurons. This fact had always been a point of weird pride in the field — hey, the brain is SO fancy and amazing that its elements are irreplaceable, not like some dumb-ass simplistic liver that's so totally fungible that it can regrow itself. And what this fact also reinforced, in passing, was the dogma that the brain is set in stone very early on in life, that there's all sorts of things that can't be changed once a certain time-window had passed.

Starting in the 1960's, a handful of crackpot scientists had been crying in the wilderness about how the adult brain does make new neurons. At best, their unorthodoxy was ignored; at worst, they were punished for it. But by the 1990's, it had become clear that they were right. And "adult neurogenesis" has turned into the hottest subject in the field — the brain makes new neurons, makes them under interesting circumstances, fails to under other interesting ones.

The new neurons function, are integrated into circuits, might even be required for certain types of learning. And the phenomenon is a cornerstone of a new type of neurobiological chauvinism — part of the very complexity and magnificence of the brain is how it can rebuild itself in response to the world around it.

So, I'll admit, this business about new neurons was a tough one for me to assimilate. I wasn't invested enough in the whole business to be in the crowd indignantly saying, No, this can't be true. Instead, I just tried to ignore it. "New neurons", christ, I can't deal with this, turn the page. And after an embarrassingly long time, enough evidence had piled up that I had to change my mind and decide that I needed to deal with it after all. And it's now one of the things that my lab studies.

 So lets get studying it and have neurogenesis take over the  rehab pinacle from neuroplasticity. I'm not sure how long neuroplasticity took to be accepted within  the clinical profession but somehow we need to get this knowledge out to the survivors much much faster. So talk to your doctors and therapists and lets get the hundredth monkey theory working.