This is really cool, but some background helps. There has been a longstanding discussion about how neural networks form: do we start with a densely connected brain and then prune connections that are not being used, or do we start with a loosely connected brain and grow new connections as we gain experience? There's a (very loose) alignment between cognitivists (such as Fodor and Chomsky) with the former, and connectionists (such as Hebb and Rosenblatt) with the latter. This article describes actual video recording the former: an immune cell called a microglia actually pruning a synapse between two neural cells. "A microglia cell expressing a green fluorescent protein clearly reaches out a ghostly green tentacle to a budding presynapse on a neuron and lifts it away, leaving the neighboring blue axon untouched."
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