[MURG] Non-invasive 3-D Scanning

[Yan King Yin]

From: "Randal A. Koene" <rak at minduploading.org>

>Just to interject my take on this. What John was presenting at BU that day
>is actually stuff that Eric Kandel described earlier (and in some high
>profile Science papers). But, this so-called "late-LTP" is often believed
>to be the precursor to long-lasting morphological plasticity in synapses.
>Its dependence on protein synthesis is very similar to that of
>morphological changes and quite distinct from the processes seen in early
>LTP.

This is very interesting development, I'll definitely look it up.
There was speculation that LTP leads to splitting of a synapse into
2 and then neurite remodeling, though I haven't seen a movie of
it. If this is confirmed, then we know the whole cascade of memory
consolidation at the cellular level.

Still, information could be encoded in the time domain, as inter-
-spike intervals, and as response characteristics of *dynamic*
synapses in the time domain. This info can be somewhat orthogonal
to LTP, and it could be long lasting as well.

>If you're willing to overlook such an intermediary stage, possibly the
>conversion to lasting memory, then you can still make do with
>morphological data.

If the dynamic mechanisms that I mentioned above does not exist,
then memory = synaptic strengths + morphology. Even then,
synaptic strengths may contain significant amounts of information
to the point that they cannot be ignored, especially in view
of non-linear dendritic integration.

YKY


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