Introducing the brain: creating memory (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 10, 2022, 20:14 (837 days ago) @ David Turell

A dramatic synapse change:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-memories-brain-potential-impact-conditions.html

"After six years of research, they made the groundbreaking discovery that learning causes synapses, the connections between neurons, to proliferate in some areas and disappear in others rather than merely changing their strength, as commonly thought. These changes in synapses may help explain how memories are formed and why certain kinds of memories are stronger than others.

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"Through a multidisciplinary collaboration between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the teams were able to determine for the first time the strength and location of synapses before and after learning in the brain of a living zebrafish, an animal commonly used to study brain function. Zebrafish are large enough to have brains that function like our own, but small and transparent enough to offer a window into the living brain. By keeping the intact fish alive, they were able to compare synapses in the same brain over time, a breakthrough in the neuroscience field.

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"The main takeaway when analyzing those images: Rather than the memory causing the strength of existing synapses to change, the synapses in one part of the brain were destroyed and completely new synapses were created in a different region of the brain.

"'For the last 40 years the common wisdom was that you learn by changing the strength of the synapses," said Kesselman, who also serves as director of the Informatics Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute and is a professor with the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, "but that's not what we found in this case.'"

Comment: the hippocampus receives recent events and sends them elsewhere for permanent storage. Since our brain's processes evolved from earlier forms the zebra fish is an excellent research animal.