초록 열기/닫기 버튼
For the twenty first century we are confronted with an important issue to solve the puzzle of mind, the integrity of human mentation. A considerable progress has been made in the biological study of learning and memory that plays a key role in cognitive function of the brain. Not only human beings but also animals communicate continuously with the environment through the nervous system and utilize profitably information derived from it, hence creating the appropriate behavior for both adaptation and survival. Learning can be psychologically classified into declarative and reflexive memory, which can now be approached with the methods of modern biology. From the cellular and molecular studies on the gill-withdrawal reflex in Aplysia as well as long-term potentiation(LTP) in the brain hippocampus, it has been proven that long-term memory is accompanied by the structural changes in the nervous system, exhibiting a requirement for new protein and mRNA synthesis. There is also abundant evidence that long-term facilitation(LTF), a cellular mechanism of a reflexive memory, shares many features with LTP that is thought to be involved in declarative memory. Based on the notion that synaptic plasticity is evolutionarily conserved in the nervous system, a hypothesis is suggested that there may be a molecular or cellular hierarchy that binds together the diverse memory forms. The degree of complexity in a learned information defined by the forms of memory may depend on the number of synapses that are recruited. These synapses may also be associated to one another by super-synaptic plasticity to encode complex information. In this lecture, current progress in molecular study for learning and memory will also be described in addition to the comparative studies of different animal model systems.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Memory, Aplysia, LTP, LTF, Synaptic plasticity
