A couple years ago I went to a talk from a national geographic photographer who mentioned these arctic ground squirrels that if you pierce their brain with a needle while they're awake, they die instantly, but if you do it while they're hibernating, they'll wake up normal.
Found an article about their brains: What the Supercool Arctic Ground Squirrel Teaches Us about the Brain's Resilience - Scientific American
The talk was mainly about the unknown scientific value of rare/endangered/extinct species, and how each human generation is further removed from nature than their parents and each generation before them, among other things.
Found an article about their brains: What the Supercool Arctic Ground Squirrel Teaches Us about the Brain's Resilience - Scientific American
As their lungs and hearts slow, the rivers of blood flowing through their bodies dwindle and their core body temperatures plummet, dipping below the freezing point of water. Electrical signals zipping along crisscrossing neural highways vanish in many areas of the brain. Seven months later the squirrels wake up and return to the surface—famished, eager to mate and perfectly healthy.
Hibernation devastates the ground squirrel brain, wilting thousands if not millions of vital connections between brain cells, known as synapses. But its brain has evolved impressive resilience, repeatedly renewing itself at astonishing speeds, like a forest erupting through the scorched earth in a matter of days.
Although scientists have documented structural changes to cells in the hibernating squirrel's brain, they do not yet understand what triggers the brain's recovery. Thomas Arendt of the University of Leipzig in Germany thinks the answer may involve a protein named tau. The more synapses the rodents' brains lost during hibernation, the more hyperphosphorylated tau accrued in their neurons.
The talk was mainly about the unknown scientific value of rare/endangered/extinct species, and how each human generation is further removed from nature than their parents and each generation before them, among other things.