learning tagged posts

If you’ve heard of two of the brain’s chemical neurotransmitters, it’s probably dopamine and serotonin. Never mind that glutamate and GABA do most of the work—it’s the thrill of dopamine as the “pleasure chemical” and serotonin as a tender mood-stabilizer that attract all the headlines.

Of course, the headlines mostly get it wrong. Dopamine’s role in shaping behavior goes way beyond simple concepts like “pleasure” or even “reward”...

It’s common knowledge that our brains—and, specifically, our brain cells—store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to Enhance Learning and to Treat Memory-related Afflictions.

“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The research so...

Researchers have established the protein p53 as critical for regulating sociability, repetitive behavior, and hippocampus-related learning and memory in mice, illuminating the relationship between the protein-coding gene TP53 and neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders like ...

Learning, remembering something, and recalling memories is supported by multiple separate groups of neurons connected inside and across key regions in the brain. If these neural assemblies fail to sync together at the right time, the memories are lost, a new study led by the universities of Bristol and Heidelberg has found.

How do you keep track of what to do next? What happens in the brain when your mind goes blank? Short-term memory relies on two key brain regions: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The researchers set out to establish how these brain regions interact with one another as memories are formed, maintained and recalled at the level of specific groups of neurons. The study, published in Current Biology, also wanted to understand why memory sometimes fails.