medium · LSAT Reading Comprehension
A neuroscience passage recounts that, for most of the twentieth century, scientists believed the adult brain's wiring was permanently fixed. A central piece of evidence was clinical: when adults suffered brain injuries, they typically retained permanent functional deficits, whereas children often recovered. To researchers of the era, the adults' lasting impairments seemed to confirm that the mature brain could not generate replacement neurons to compensate for damage. Only in the late 1990s, the passage adds, did findings of adult neurogenesis overturn this assumption.
According to the passage, the clinical observation of adult brain injuries contributed to twentieth-century neuroscience in which one of the following ways?
- It lent empirical weight to the prevailing view that the mature brain's structure was unchangeable.
- It directly gave rise to the environmental-enrichment therapies developed in the 1950s.
- It established that children and adults possess identical capacities for neural plasticity.
- It demonstrated that the hippocampus is the brain's sole site of memory formation.
- It revealed that adult brains halt all neuron production after the age of eighteen.
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