[MURG] Non-invasive 3-D Scanning

Yan King Yin y.k.y at lycos.com
Mon Dec 15 15:13:43 EST 2003


From: "Joseph J. Strout" <joe at strout.net>
>
>I don't believe that LTP makes me "me" -- it forms and fades away on 
>the order of minutes to hours.  I'm quite willing to accept a few 
>hours of retrograde amnesia (head trauma can cause that even today). 
>Long-term memory is almost certainly encoded in structural changes, 
>e.g. the formation of new synapses and withdrawal of old ones.

That's a good point, it's stupid to try to extract the short
time-scale stuff. But it's also more complicated than that.
We need:

1) structural information

2) synaptic strength -- the size of a synapse is quite
   stable, at least longer than LTP. BTW, some weaker
   components of LTP may last longer than hours, to
   days (or weeks?) IIRC.

3) cell-type information which is the gene activation
   states as Joe pointed out before. For example the
   slow-acting neuropeptides that are released by a
   neuron. This is important because it affects neural
   dynamics and is stable over a long time (I assume).

YKY


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