Neuroscience: A New Pathway to Make Us Smarter and Happier.

Treatments that improve cognition and decrease depression converge on decreasing phosphorylation of eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF2). This decrease is sufficient to lead to altered levels of proteins that cause an increase in new neurons, improved cognition and less depression.

Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information-storing molecules?

Karl Lashley began the search for the engram nearly seventy years ago. In the time since, much has been learned but divisions remain. In the contemporary neurobiology of learning and memory, two profoundly different conceptions contend: the associative/connectionist (A/C) conception and the computational/representational (C/R) conception.

Polysomes identified by live imaging of nascent peptides are stalled in hippocampal and cortical neurites.

In neurons, mRNAs can be repressed postinitiation and assembled into granules enabling the transport and later, regulated reactivation of the paused mRNAs. It has been suggested that a large percentage of transcripts in neuronal processes are stored in these stalled polysomes. Given this, it is predicted that nascent peptides should be abundant in these granules.

Remembering to Forget: A Dual Role for Sleep Oscillations in Memory Consolidation and Forgetting.

It has been known since the time of patient H. M. and Karl Lashley's equipotentiality studies that the hippocampus and cortex serve mnestic functions.

The Synaptic Theory of Memory: A Historical Survey and Reconciliation of Recent Opposition.

Trettenbrein (2016) has argued that the concept of the synapse as the locus of memory is outdated and has made six critiques of this concept. In this article, we examine these six critiques and suggest that the current theories of the neurobiology of memory and the empirical data indicate that synaptic activation is the first step in a chain of cellular and biochemical events that lead to memories formed in cell assemblies and neural networks that rely on synaptic modification for their formation. These neural networks and their modified synaptic connections can account for the cognitive basis of learning and memory and for memory deterioration in neurological disorders.