[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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